


Nothing Suits Me Like A Suit

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:29:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seventeen years ago, Ned Stark was given a medal and the promise of a favour in return for his sister's life.</p><p>Right now, Sansa Stark just wants to get her little brother out from behind that <em>fucking</em> two-way mirror, and that medal feels like her very last chance to set things at least halfway right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Hammers and Nails

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TobermorianSass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/gifts), [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/gifts).



> The much vaunted Kingsman AU :D
> 
> Title taken from HIMYM. New chapters daily :DD

“She was _twenty-one_ ,” Lancelot said furiously, pushing Arthur back against the wall. Lancelot was just barely the taller, but he was heavier built by a significant margin, which meant Arthur’s struggles were less than useless. “She was twenty-one years old, you _bastard_ , and she was showing the most _amazing_ promise-”

“With respect, Lancelot,” Arthur said, voice as cool as though they were discussing the cricket test scores over a glass of lemonade on the terrace at the clubhouse, “she was a legal adult, and a trainee agent to boot. It’s hardly as though I took advantage of her.”

Arthur - Rhaegar Targaryen, rightly, but while at work, these men did not share their real names. To do so was tantamount to risking one’s security, which was _infinitely_ more dangerous than risking one’s life - was a handsome man, and handsome men with the sort of melancholy charm such as he possessed never seemed to see it as _taking advantage_ , in Lancelot’s experience.

“You didn’t- _with respect_ , Arthur,” Lancelot spat, seizing Arthur by the lapels and hoisting him three inches clear of the floor. “You are the _ultimate superior_ for our trainee agents. It is _impossible_ for you to have a relationship with any of them _without_ taking advantage.”

“You’re overreacting-”

Lancelot - Barristan Selmy, by his birth certificate and real passport - was not a man prone to overreaction. He was renowned throughout their organisation for his cool head, for his logical consideration, for his calm nature. This was not a matter of overreacting, however, but a question of drilling the notion of _being at fault through_ Arthur’s thick skull.

Their organisation did not have many rules, beyond the code of conduct. Few things were set in stone that their members would not have learned as children, or at least at university. One of those rules, however, was against fraternisation - particularly between field agents, but also, of course, between field agents and _cadets._

_“She died giving birth to your child, Rhaegar!”_

“So she did,” Arthur said, just as coolly as ever. “Had she been proper Kingsman material, she would never have slept with a man without ensuring that there was no chance of her conceiving a child. It seems, old friend, that my candidate has succeeded - summon our new Galahad to the shop when you get a chance, will you?”

 

* * *

 

The tall man with the neat white hair looked completely forlorn as he explained, haltingly and with many redactions, that Lyanna wouldn’t be coming home.

Ned was a terrible liar, he knew that, but he could spot a liar from ten yards, and this Barristan Selmy was lying at the very least by omission as he told them about Lyanna’s final months.

“There was an… Incident. While she was on a highly classified mission. I’m afraid I can’t go into any more detail than that.”

“We didn’t even know she’d been assigned,” Ned said, trying to keep his voice down, because Cat was having a lie down in the front room. “The last we heard, she was still in training.”

Lya had signed up straight out of school, half because of that fierce temper of hers, because she’d never gotten over Brandon and Dad getting killed in action. Dad hadn’t even technically been _in action_ , he’d been out there as a civilian advisor to the army, but the bomb hadn’t cared about his official designation.

Ned had always assumed she’d end up with a desk job, or on training duty. Not poached for some top-secret team, the name of which he couldn’t even be told, and definitely not dead at twenty-one.

“Do we get her body to bury?” he asked, pursing his lips when this Selmy man looked even more guilty and despairing than before. “Of course not. We might be able to work out how she died if we had her body.”

“I am truly sorry,” Mr. Selmy offered. “We cannot offer you much recompense, and we cannot give her any recognition, but there is this.”

He produced a small black velvet box from his inner pocket and handed it to Ned. Inside was a medal, on a pink and white striped ribbon, with a strange insignia.

“There’s a number on the back,” Mr. Selmy said. “We cannot offer recompense, but we can offer a- a favour of sorts. If in need, call that number, and use the code _oxfords, not brogues,_ so we’ll know it’s you.”

“Thank you,” Ned said, “and I’m sure this is a very useful favour to have, but I’d like you to leave now. I don’t want any man who thinks a medal and a favour are in any way equal to my sister’s life in my house, thank you.”


	2. Not a test

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Daenerys Targaryen, alias Galahad, embarks on several new adventures, and Sansa Stark continues with her routine, until such a time as she does not.

Barristan Selmy had been Lancelot for longer than Dany had known that the Kingsman organisation even existed, and it seemed strange to walk into the dining room to find his chair empty.

Lancelot’s chair was to the right of Arthur’s. Dany took her own seat across the table, slipping her glasses into place, and almost flinched at the persistent gap where Barristan had sat, calm and eternal, for her entire time as part of the organisation.

Daenerys Targaryen had served as Galahad for seventeen years, less two months, ever since the last Galahad had died, a man called Dayne who had been very close to Arthur. Dany was arguably closer to Arthur than anyone else in the organisation could be, but she preferred not to think about that.

Lyanna Stark, after all, had been her friend as well as her competition, and would have made an excellent Galahad, even if Arthur had disapproved of her for not coming from one of the _right_ families. What he’d done to push her out of the organisation had been wrong, wrong in every conceivable manner, and Dany dreaded to think how her brother would react if someone brought in someone of a similar background as their candidate for Lancelot’s replacement.

Then again, maybe the time was ripe for a little new blood, in more ways than one. It was all a bit incestuous, herself being perfect proof of that.

Rhaegar Targaryen, alias Arthur, was as blonde as Dany herself, but was tall and dignified in a manner that said he had a stick up his arse, and was a dangerous enemy. Even as his sister, Daenerys understood that. He was sitting at the head of the table with an odd, pensive expression on his face, tapping his finger on the rim of his glass.

“Now that we’re all here,” he said, not looking up to greet her, “I believe we can finally begin.”

True enough, now that she had her glasses in place, Dany could see the holograms of the other agents, all of whom were already present. She was one of only two women - Percival, next to Lancelot’s empty seat, was red-haired even through the blue overlay of the hologram - but otherwise, they all looked alike. All with neat hair, exquisite suits, and over-large glasses, all with a glass of obscenely expensive brandy in hand.

“It has been seventeen years since last we had cause to share a glass of this brandy,” Arthur said quietly. “To Lancelot.”

They all murmured a reply, drank their brandy, and waited.

“I expect your candidates for his replacement by nine o’clock on Saturday morning, at headquarters,” he said. “Don’t be late.”

Dany waited while the others departed in a buzz of disabling comms, and set her glasses on the table with a sigh.

“He’ll be missed,” she said carefully. “You’ll be putting forward a candidate yourself, I presume?”

He’d been the one to put Dany forward as Galahad’s replacement, all that time ago. She presumed he had another rich young demi-noble who thought they were hot shit in mind this time around, too, since that’s what she’d been back in the day. She knew better now, of course, but it had taken a lot of slapping down during her training to get there.

“Of course,” Arthur said. “And I expect your candidate to be… Appropriate.”

Dany was saved having to argue that point by Merlin’s arrival - he was a tall man with a posh-boy flop of bright brown curls and a bad limp from his false leg, and was an absolute genius with computers, people, and anything with a motor.

“Morning all,” he said mildly, holding up his tablet with a small smile. “Glasses, please.”

Dany slipped her glasses back on, frowning up at Lancelot’s picture on the screen - it had obviously been taken years before, because his hair was grey rather than the snowy white Dany had always known him to have - and settling back to hear Merlin’s intel.

“Lancelot was on a fact-finding mission when he was alerted to the kidnap of Professor Alyn Pycelle, who was being held hostage in a remote cabin in the Pyrenees. Pycelle,” Merlin went on, bringing the professor’s picture up on screen, along with a surveillance photo of a snowbound cabin. Dany focused extra hard, because she’d always found the lilt of his gentle Welsh accent oddly distracting - not in any sort of untoward sense, since he was more or less the opposite of what she looked for in an intimate companion, but in that it was so soothing that she sometimes... Drifted off, just a little, while he was speaking. “Pycelle is an economist, with dozens of papers on sustainable development and resource management - he’s regarded as a genius but a crackpot. Whatever happened in that cabin, we don’t know, because it would seem that Professor Pycelle is very much not missing.”

The newest thing on the screen was a video, apparently a livefeed, showing the professor shuffling through the rain.

“Here he is, on his way to give his eleven o’clock lecture at Imperial College,” Merlin said, giving them each a significant look. “Perhaps someone ought to pay the good professor a visit?”

Dany looked to Arthur, who shrugged. “Call on Professor Pycelle, Galahad, and don’t forget your candidate - Saturday morning, nine o’clock.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa heaved the doors of the van open so Bran could get out and be on his way to class, bracing herself for another argument with Arya as she did so.

“Yes,” she said, the second Arya appeared round the side of the van, one earbud hanging loose and blaring some kind of Skrillex sounding shit. “You do have to go to class. You are going to remain in college. You are going to get your degree. You are going to get a good job. You are not going to drop out to _help the family.”_

 _“You_ did,” Arya snapped, bracing her hands on her hips and rocking forward onto her toes to try and get in Sansa’s face. “You were final year and you dropped out to help Mum-”

“It may have escaped your notice, Arya,” Sansa hissed, “but I dropped out in final year because Dad and Robb were killed, Bran was put in a wheelchair, and we lost most of our money. It was either you go to college and we afford Bran’s medical bills, or I go to college and the rest of you go fuck yourselves. So yes, I dropped out, and yes, I am working two jobs to help afford all five of us in that shithole flat, but you know what? If you don’t stop threatening to drop out of _fucking_ college every time you get into an argument or your lecturers don’t like your ideas, I’ll stop covering your housekeeping and you’ll have to tell Mum you smoke.”

Arya was short a fiver for the housekeeping pot every week, because she needed that extra for her cigs, and Sansa had been covering it for months now to spare Mum the stress of worrying about one of them developing lung cancer or having a stroke. That fiver a week was her best leverage over Arya, and by God she was going to use it.

“Now get the fuck to class,” she said. “I won’t be able to pick you up this evening because I’ve got work, so hang about and give Bran a hand on the bus, yeah?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Arya sighed, pulling a lighter and a packet of smokes from the massive pocket of her parka and stepping up onto the footpath beside Bran. “You’re a fucking nightmare sometimes, you know.”

“Love you too,” Sansa called, climbing into the van. “Be good, I’ll have dinner when you get in - no later than eight, yeah? Mum and me both have work tonight and you know she doesn’t like Rickon being home alone in the dark.”

They’d be home in plenty of time, she knew, because they always were - no matter how much she and Arya might bicker, they were good kids.

 _Good kids,_ she thought as she pulled away, _fucking Christ, I’m only three years older than Arya._

She did the shopping on her way home, and collected the wreaths for Dad and Robb’s graves - their anniversaries were only a few weeks apart, so they intended on visiting the graveyard in the middle. It was hard to get Bran’s chair across the grass so they tried to keep visits to a minimum, if they could.

Mum was out when she got home - at work, of course - so Sansa put the shopping away, made the beds, took out the rubbish, and did the ironing. Then she went for a kip for a few hours, because she was due to be in work until three or four in the morning, and would have to be up at seven to get the kids off to school and college.

Thank God Arya and Bran went to the same college, was all she could say, and that it wasn’t too far away - she was grateful that Rickon’s school was nearby, too, because it meant that she could do the run all in one go, instead of having to cut back through the traffic like she’d had to do last year, before Rickon got himself kicked out of his old school, the same private school every Stark for ten generations had attended.

Maybe that wasn’t fair. He’d been dealing with a lot, and dealing with it really well, all things considered, but when the money started disappearing, so did Rickon’s friends, and he got the blame when the bullies came calling.

“Little fucks,” Sansa grumbled, rolling over and falling back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

Every day was more or less the same, Monday to Thursday, but Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Sansa worked her other job, with Petyr.

She didn’t like Petyr - he gave her the creeps, and liked to stand a bit too close, so she could feel how cool his breath was from all that spearmint Wrigleys he was always chewing - but he’d given her the job even though she didn’t have any qualifications beyond her A-Levels. Mum’d always told her to keep her nose as clean as possible, which was proving hard now that she was seeing Petyr’s books on the regular, but he paid so well that she couldn’t afford to question why a “successful local businessman” only kept office hours Friday to Sunday, between nine and two.

And then there was the dress code. Sansa was just glad that Primark did those massive girdle knickers as well as the cheap pencil skirts - nothing put a pervert off like a pair of granny knickers.

Mum worked six days a week, tutoring for twenty pounds an hour after school and from nine til seven on Saturdays, and she always kept her phone off while she was teaching.

Which was why Sansa got the call from the nick.

“Baelish’s,” she said, tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder and grabbing a pen and notepad. “How can I help?”

_“This is DS Cassel, looking for Sansa Stark.”_

Oh, _bollocks._ Jory had been a friend of Dad’s, and had been good to them since things started going down the shitter - he’d kept an eye out for Rickon as best he could, which was an absolute godsend, what with Sansa and Mum both up to their necks with work and Rickon going increasingly off the rails.

“What did he do, Jory?”

 _“I think you’d best come down the station, Sansa,”_ Jory said, sounding so tired that Sansa half wanted to cry. She was so sick of people _worrying_ about her family - why couldn’t they just set things right? Why did everything have to be so bloody hard? _“He won’t talk to any of us.”_

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she promised, hanging up and reaching behind herself for her coat, which was a big parka thing much the same as Arya’s, which hid her arse in those bloody pencil skirts while she was walking to and from Petyr’s through the estate, and hid everything else when she wasn’t in the mood to change out of her grotty jumper and jeans to run down to Asda for bread and milk. Petyr was always telling her she ought to dress nicer, _a pretty girl like you_ , so she made sure to never wear heels, no matter how often he suggested it, and she stuck with her parka, and wore a big bobble hat Arya had knitted when they were small.

Petyr opened the door of his office himself when she knocked, all smiles until he noticed her parka.

“What did the brat do now?” he groused, stalking back around his desk and flinging himself down into his big swivel chair. “Did he finally murder someone?”

Sansa grit her teeth - she couldn’t afford to lose this job, but the way Petyr talked about her family, herself and Mum excepted, made her stomach twist up in knots.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I need to get down the station to get him sorted. Can I take off early? I’ll make it up to you tomorrow.”

He looked at her over his steepled fingers for long enough to make her squirm, and then nodded.

“Come in an hour early,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.”

Sansa hated the idea of coming in early - she’d had to do it a couple of times before, and it was always just her and Petyr, with no one else around before half nine and only half the office lights on, but she couldn’t stay on late because she had to get dinner made for the kids before she went to work down the pub at three.

“See you then,” she said, as cheerfully as she could, and then she ran.

 

* * *

 

When she got there, she was led into the room behind the two way mirror, rather than being let in to see Rickon - she reckoned that was a bad sign, but she didn’t dare say anything. Jory was frowning, and he leaned back against the glass once she’d closed the door behind her.

“He didn’t kill anyone,” he assured her, and she sagged in relief - she hadn’t really believed that Rickon would, but the fear was there all the same. Rickon had a habit of getting into fights that were bigger than him, and she was terrified that one day, a fight’d get the better of him. “Didn’t even hit anyone - shoplifting, Sansa. He was caught coming out of Boots, but he’d made a stop in Tesco first.”

Sansa had a terrible feeling about why Rickon’d gone to Tesco - he’d been feeding that massive big mongrel of a dog that’d been following him around lately, she suspected, and since he got just enough pocket money to cover a good haircut every couple of weeks, a few sweets, and his membership down the gym, she should have _known_ he was lifting the food for the animal.

Boots, though? The idea of Rickon knicking stuff from Boots made her queasy. Boots had a pharmacy, one with all kinds of painkillers and things within easy reach - was Rickon an addict? There was a group of them hung out under the overpass on the edge of the estate, and if he’d fallen in with them-

“His schoolbag was full of bandages, surgical tape, that kind of thing. He had one of those massive bottles of Dettol, Savlon cream, the kind of stuff you use to treat wounds.”

Oh, no, this was almost worse than Rickon being addicted to painkillers or something.

“And Rennies - I’ve never known a seventeen year old boy to steal antacids before, I admit,” Jory said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Any thoughts?”

“They’re for Bran,” Sansa said miserably. “We go through a mountain of that stuff every week. I’m going to kill him-”

“Look, I can get them to go easy on him,” Jory said. “He didn’t lift anything dangerous, so they aren’t too worried - but this isn’t his first warning, Sansa. He’s going to face some repercussions.”

And that’d break Mum’s heart clean in two, wouldn’t it? Rickon being sent down because he’d wanted to make things easier on them, wanted to help take care of the family. Fucking hell.

“I need to make a call,” she said, in the midst of glorious epiphany. “Can you give me five minutes?”

She didn’t have much cause to use her phone, so she was relieved when she had enough credit to make one call.

She had a medallion she wore around her neck, the same one Robb had worn, which Dad had worn before that - it had belonged to Dad’s sister, Lya, who’d died when Sansa was six - and Sansa pulled it out from under her top now, praying Dad hadn’t been talking shit all those years.

She dialed the number on the back, waited for someone to pick up, and prayed harder than she had in years.

As soon as someone picked up on the other end, she blurted out “Oxfords, not brogues,” and hoped like hell this wasn’t some elaborate practical joke.

 

* * *

Rickon had locked himself away as soon as they got him, furious with Sansa for not being grateful to him for stealing supplies for Bran - even the damn _Rennies,_ because Bran’s painkillers gave him heartburn - and Sansa called in sick to work down the pub.

Arya and Bran took advantage of not having to be home early to keep an eye on Rickon and stayed out with friends, and Sansa braced herself to explain everything to Mum. It was going to be a nightmare, because Mum would be disappointed in all of them, and Sansa was already exhausted without having to fight with Mum.

The knock on the door set her cursing, because the very last thing she wanted was company just now - all she wanted was to sit down with a cup of tea and stop her hands from shaking with _shame._

But she had to answer the door, so she put the teabags away and checked the peephole. The woman outside looked like a bloody solicitor, with her pale blonde hair neatly tied back in a bun, wearing an obviously expensive suit and neat lace-up shoes, and that was the _last_ thing Sansa needed just now. There’d been an awful lot of solicitors just after Dad and Robb were killed, every single one of them chipping away another chunk of the family fortune until they were left with nothing more than a shitty ground-floor flat in a shitty estate in a fairly shitty part of the city.

“You can speak to our solicitor if you have papers,” she called through the door, hoping that would be enough to make the woman go away. The idea of having to face Mum with the news of Rickon’s arrest after facing a solicitor made Sansa feel completely overwhelmed, and she let her head rest against the door for just a second in preparation.

“I’m here to see you, Sansa,” the woman said, “it’s about Rickon’s having been released without any charges.”

Oh, _shit._

“I’m not a solicitor,” the woman said, sounding cheerful and Oxbridge and just like a solicitor. “I have a proposition for you, Sansa. May I come in?”

“I’m not in the business of letting strangers in,” Sansa said. “Especially not strange solicitors.”

“As I say, I’m not a solicitor,” the woman said. “My name is Daenerys Targaryen. I worked with your aunt - and I know who gave you the medal you made use of this afternoon.”

Sansa opened the door.


	3. A baptism of fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sansa receives a job offer, many introductions are made, and no one gets a good night's sleep.

It was just her luck that she barely had the not-a-solicitor across the threshold when Mum arrived.

“Hello, love,” she said, sounding tired but pleased, just as she always did after a long day’s teaching. Mum loved her work, but being the primary wage earner for a family of six was hard work, even with what Sansa brought in between the pub and Petyr’s, and what Arya earned at her weekend job down the garage on the edge of the estate. “Rickon in his room?”

“Yeah, he is,” Sansa said, “Mum, this is-”

“Daenerys Targaryen,” the not-a-solicitor cut in smoothly, saving Sansa an awkward moment of having to admit that she hadn’t a clue as to the woman’s name. “I’ve come about a job offer for your daughter, Mrs. Stark.”

This was news to Sansa, but she forced a smile and went along with the story Miss Targaryen was spinning. Apparently, she had applied for a job in Miss Targaryen’s company, and since her work schedule hadn’t allowed for her to make the interview sessions, she had arranged for a home interview.

“Of course, if the interview is a success, Sansa will have to come to our facility in Oxfordshire for training,” Miss Targaryen said brightly. “Her living expenses and any necessary equipment will be covered, and should she prove unsuited for the position, the company will pay for her to return to university to complete her degree.”

“My God,” Mum said, sounding about as faint as Sansa felt. “You’d pay for her to go back to college?”

Sansa missed college with a desperation she kept carefully hidden from Mum and the others, and the thought of going back made her tummy flip over. Could she? Could she go back and do her final year and _get to be a doctor_? College was free in Scotland, yes, but Sansa couldn't manage work _and_ college, not without extra money coming in _somewhere._

“I’ll just grab my coat,” she said cheerfully. “Miss Targaryen and I’ll go down the caff, Mum, and I’ll be back in time to bring Bran swimming.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Mum said, helping her into her parka and shooing her out the door with a slightly manic smile. “You go on, I’ll manage that.”

The walk to the caff took them right across the estate, over the green and down the underpass, and Sansa felt incredibly self-conscious beside the immaculate Miss Targaryen, whose hair was so pale it glowed slightly in the gloom of the underpass, and whose neat black shoes shone under the streetlights.

“Have you always been very conscious of your height?” she asked, which startled Sansa - true enough, she was taller than average by a good margin, and she did slouch a bit while she was walking through the estate, but that was mostly a defensive measure. A tall girl with hair like Sansa’s drew attention, so she always wore her hair up, or under a beanie, and slumped a bit. You didn’t ever want to draw attention on the estate, not knowing some of the goons who hung about near the caff.

The caff itself belonged to Petyr - its proper name was the Mockingbird, not that anyone used that - and was, on the inside, clean and well lit, and a good place to get a cup of tea for under a pound without going into town. The only other caff nearby was a ten minute walk further away, and the tea there was twenty pence dearer, so Sansa had to run the risk of bumping into Petyr even on her downtime if she wanted half an hour away from home, without putting herself in danger by going to the other caff.

To get there, you had to go under the bypass. No one went under the bypass unless they had no other choice.

Miss Targaryen smiled pleasantly and ordered a black coffee - five pence dearer than a tea - and sat quite happily across from Sansa, just looking at her for a few minutes.

“As you might have guessed,” she said at last, “I work for a powerful organisation. As of this afternoon, there is no record of your brother’s arrests, or your sister’s caution for all that graffiti she and her friends sprayed all over the bypass bridge. In return, I ask only that you consider an offer.”

“A job offer,” Sansa said carefully, stirring her tea just for something to do with her hands. “A very _vague_ job offer.”

Miss Targaryen smiled, a whole new smile that made the short hairs on the back of Sansa’s neck stand on end.

“Tell me,” she said, and her eye teeth were very sharp. “You’re wearing a cheap pencil skirt and a pair of shoes which, although low heeled, you are clearly uncomfortable walking in - you’re being made to wear them for work, I expect, and know it’s because your employer objectifies you. Your other employers at the King’s Head, on the other hand, have hinted more than once that they feel you ought to show a little more skin to entice the punters some more, and you’ve only escaped censure this far because of your reliability and efficiency. Do you enjoy this life?"

Sansa couldn’t help it - her jaw fell so far she knew her mouth was hanging open. How the hell did this _stranger_ know those things? No one knew those things, not even _Arya_!

“Now, if you come with me,” Miss Targaryen said, “you will wear only clothes tailored for you, so they will actually _fit,_ and the practical sort of shoes in which one can walk comfortably. You will be paid very well, should you get the job, and there are many fringe benefits. A house, for example, rent free.”

Sansa had managed to close her mouth, and she was glad of it - their house, the big house that had been in Dad’s family for generations, where they’d all grown up, had been repossessed after him and Robb were killed, when the bank had suddenly decided to take _everything_ from them, and the idea of living in an _actual house,_ and _rent free,_ well, it was enough to make her mouth water. Their little two-bed shithole flat was far from ideal, if only because Bran’s chair and other stuff took up so much room, and it was unfair on Mum for her to have to share with Sansa and Arya.

“Why me?” Sansa asked at last. “For this job. What makes you think I’m well suited?”

“As I said, I knew your aunt,” Miss Targaryen said. “She and I worked together, before her death - I’ve kept an eye on your family as best I could since then, for Lya’s sake.”

She couldn’t help but snort in derision at that - no one had been keeping an eye last year, had they?

“I was away on a highly classified mission for almost two years,” Miss Targaryen said, her voice soft and very sad. “Lya used talk about you all the time. She loved your father enormously, and had I known, I would have done everything I could to help.”

Somehow, Sansa believed this woman, this stranger who looked like a solicitor, more than she had believed most of their old family friends - something in Daenerys Targaryen’s voice was sincere, and true, and for once, Sansa didn’t feel patronised by an offered sympathy.

“This job,” Daenerys said carefully, “is very dangerous. I won’t deny that. However, I promise to look after your family, in the event of your injury or death.”

Well, that was less than comforting. The promise of the others being looked after, though…

“Alright,” Sansa said. “When do I start?”

* * *

 

As it turned out, she started the following morning.

“I saw Lyanna from down there, when she arrived,” Daenerys said, coming to stand beside Sansa. She’d given Sansa a chance to pop home for a shower and a change of clothes, and looking down at the other candidates Daenerys had warned her about, Sansa could see that her blue runners and skinny jeans and the blue-and-white floral Addidas jacket Arya and Bran and Rickon had gone in together on for her birthday was not part of the apparent dress code. “She had the same expression on her face as you do, you know.”

“I’ll bet she was better dressed,” Sansa said, reaching up to pat at the massive puff of her bun on the back of her head - the others were all sleek and well put together, and she felt _poor,_ just looking down at them. There was an awful lot of tweed going on. “Was I supposed to dress like that?”

Daenerys just smiled, all edges and too-sharp eye teeth, and beckoned for Sansa to follow her. Sansa had done a lot of that, following Daenerys without question to a tailor’s shop and then into a weird underground train with awful corduroy chairs like Mrs Smallwood across the way had in her front room, so it didn’t seem like a terrible idea to follow her again.

Daenerys led her down some stairs and a corridor, all very practical steel and studded walls, and then around a corner to where a tall man with fabulous hair and a terrible jumper was standing, apparently waiting on them. It was green, the jumper, a monstrosity of intricate cable knit, and there was a stripe of bright golden yellow through the collar and cuffs. She’d never been one for knitwear, but even so, this made her feel sorry for the knitters of the country, as a bad example of their craft.

“You’re late,” he said to Daenerys, who stuck out her tongue at him before turning to Sansa and sticking out her hand.

“Good luck,” she said earnestly as they shook, “I’m sure you’ll excel just as much as Lyanna did.”

As she was walking away, Daenerys shouted “Be nice to her, Merlin!” back over her shoulder, which made Sansa laugh.

“Something amusing, Sansa?” he said pleasantly, fingers drumming on the iPad he held to his chest.

“It’s just- Merlin? _Really?”_

“Well, you were just delivered by Galahad,” he said, smiling the kind of smile that made Sansa feel shy, but in a good way. “Merlin isn’t that bad a codename, bearing that in mind.”

Sansa couldn’t stop another burst of laughter. Daenerys had failed to mention _that_ little tidbit when she’d been explaining how things worked around here on their way down. Spies! Codenames! Secret headquarters! Sansa wasn’t sure what she was letting herself in for, but the prospect of financial security for her family and a chance to finish her degree was too much to pass up.

Merlin led her through one of the multitude of unmarked doors, revealing the same gang of tweedy rich kids she’d seen from the high-up window. They were all milling about, talking in very posh, very English accents, and Sansa felt something in her chest drop down low. Even if she’d been wearing the kind of clothes she’d sometimes worn at college, that little sportscoat blazer thing Mum had bought her when she’d gotten her offer from Saint Andrew’s and a pair of deck shoes, her accent would have marked her as an outsider.

“Fall in,” Merlin said mildly, and the whole gang of them stood at parade rest - Sansa knew about this sort of thing, her and Robb used to play Army when they were small, and Dad used show them all the proper stances, and used correct their grip on their toy guns. He’d taught them to shoot real guns later, rifles, shotguns, and handguns, and Sansa realised with a sudden, slightly terrifying certainty that she might need those skills soon.

“Now,” Merlin said, and Sansa noticed that he didn’t sound very English, which was a comfort - Welsh, by her guess, and she reckoned she wasn’t the only one to notice, given the way one tall blonde prat’s lip curled. “Can anyone tell me what this is?”

Sansa felt a little sick when he held up something dark green and neatly folded. She’d seen two of them just over a year ago, and while those had been black, they were unmistakable.

“A body bag,” she blurted out, only then realising that everyone else had their hands up. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude. But it is, isn’t it? A body bag?”

“Raise your hand in future, Sansa,” Merlin said, something other than censure in his eyes. “But yes, it is a body bag. All of you are to write your name, and the name of your next-of-kin, on the label on the bag on your bunk. In the event that you cock up your training as badly as has sometimes happened in the past, you _and_ your next-of-kin will find yourselves in these body bags.”

Then he smiled, a smile that made her think of Daenerys’ too-sharp eye teeth even though she knew from experience that the perfect alignment of Merlin’s teeth meant he’d suffered through braces in his teens.

“Fall out,” he said cheerfully, and departed with a slightly awkward step that reminded Sansa of someone she couldn’t quite place.

She lifted the body bag on the only bed that seemed to be unclaimed, pursing her lips and wishing they’d used literally anything else as a scare tactic. Mum’d been injured when Robb was killed, and she’d been catatonic for a day or two after Dad died, so Sansa and Robb had identified Dad and Sansa had identified Robb on her own, because she’d refused to ask that of Arya or Bran, and Rickon was too young.

“You’ll need a pen,” someone said, and Sansa looked up to find a tall, skinny girl who looked a little younger than her, with amazing dark blue eyes and what looked like burn scars on her cheek. “Shireen,” she offered, holding out a pen and then her hand. “Don’t fret about the body bags - standard military scare tactic.”

Sansa smiled, and didn’t mention that she’d had a father, three uncles, two grandfathers and a granduncle in the army, with three Paras among them. She thought it might be bad taste, as if she was bragging, and that would not help her make friends. She had a feeling she might need any friends she could get, during this training.

“Sansa,” she said, taking the pen and shaking Shireen’s hand.

 _“Sandra,”_ a new voice cut in, before Sansa could say anything else. “Not a very _Scottish_ name, is it?”

“Good thing that isn’t my name, then,” Sansa said, wondering why English people seemed to think that every Scottish person in the world was called _Hamish_. “Sansa. A pleasure, I’m sure.”

“Joffrey,” the big blonde prat said, not holding out a hand. “Tell me, where are you coming from?”

Sansa raised an eyebrow, taken aback by his sheer _rudeness._ “Excuse me?”

“You know we aren’t to talk about who proposed us,” Shireen said firmly. “Leave off, Joffrey.”

“I’m just making conversation,” he said, affecting an air of wounded… Something. Sansa didn’t trust him an inch - he reminded her of the Kettleblacks, a shower of bastards who hung around Petyr’s place and who thought every woman in the world was their personal plaything. She’d sorted Osney out with a sharply placed elbow and an even sharper knee, so they left her alone, but she’d seen them with other girls, and they made her skin crawl. So did this Joffrey character. “Cambridge? Oxford?”

“Neither,” Sansa said shortly, understanding just what he was asking. _Are you rich enough to be here?_ “Saint Andrew’s. Medicine. You? I’m guessing… An Oxford legacy? Business degree that your granddad bought for you?”

The smug smile fell away, leaving behind something ugly in its wake.

“Look here, you dirty little Scot,” he snapped. “You’re here as an experiment. No one expects you to succeed. If anyone is sent home in a body bag, it’s going to be _you._ ”

“Quaking in my Nikes,” she assured him, turning her back on him so she was facing Shireen again. “So, any idea what to expect from this training?”

* * *

 

“Professor Pycelle is doing well,” Cersei Lannister said, toying with a tiny golden lion with chips of ruby for eyes. It had been a gift to herself, when she made her first million - she hadn’t _needed_ to make millions, of course, but it had felt good to make her first at twenty-three, two years younger than her father had been when he’d achieved the same. “Good. He might be insufferable, but he’s useful.”

Cersei considered most people she tolerated to be insufferable but useful. She saw no reason to expend the effort of caring on someone outside of her family, and even within that circle, there were exceptions.

Jaime, of course, was not an exception.

“He has some interesting ideas,” he said, crossing his legs where he was perched on the edge of her desk. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”

She set down her lion in favour of wrapping her hand firmly around Jaime’s ankle, long and lean and exposed by the rise of his trouser hem. She liked that the jut of bone there matched the shape of her own, and liked the way he shifted his hips just a little - an obvious sign of arousal, to anyone who knew what they were looking for, and enough to make Cersei smile.

“Remind me why we need someone so damned _irritating,_ though,” Jaime said, the low golden light of Cersei’s desklamp glowing on his false hand. “Surely there’s some way to make this work without a slug like him?”

“You know there isn’t, darling,” she reminded him, standing up and shoving his legs apart to stand between them. “Pycelle is a genius in his field - without him, without his _interesting ideas,_ we can’t be sure of the efficacy of our plan. You _know_ that.”

Pycelle’s theories and papers had formed the basis of Cersei’s newest stroke of genius - a way to eradicate poverty and halt global warming, all through the simple application of economic principles and a little mass murder.

“As soon as we’re finished with him, we’ll pay him off, and we’ll never have to see him again. See? Nothing to worry about.”

It was probably a little premature to celebrate their victory, Cersei thought, climbing up to kneel over Jaime on the desktop, but that had never stopped them before.

* * *

 

The quiet of the dorm was disrupted around four in the morning by the blaring of sirens, and Sansa fell clean out of bed in surprise. She was relieved to find everyone else too busy panicking to notice, at least - Shireen was tangled up in her bedsheets, and the quiet boy on the far side of her who had introduced himself as Hoster looked more confused than anyone Sansa had ever seen in her life.

“Showers!” Joffrey bellowed from the other side of the room, leading the charge for the shower cubicles - the sirens, it seemed, were fire alarms, and there were flames licking at the corners of the room nearest the door. “Everyone in!”

“What’s wrong with the bloody _door?_ ” Sansa shouted above the confusion, pushing past Shireen and Hoster to try the door into the hallway - damn thing was locked, even if the fire hadn’t gotten close enough to leave the handle too hot to touch, and she didn’t have time to try and pick the lock.

She wasn’t even sure she could - she hadn’t picked a lock in years, since before she’d left home for college, and besides, she didn’t have her lockpicks with her.

The others were all tucked into the showers, crowding into the cubicles in the hopes that the spray would protect them from the flames, but Sansa had another idea - not, as Hoster was trying, to beat some of the fire out with a blanket, and certainly not to direct a showerhead at some of the mounting flames.

None of the others had thought of doing it, which, given their obvious _affluence,_ probably shouldn’t have surprised her.

In the absence of a fire extinguisher, or a chair that wasn’t bolted to the floor, Sansa threw her shoulder against the huge mirror at the bottom of the room, the one that made up a good solid half of the wall, the one which had that odd shine that meant it wasn’t just a mirror.

It was getting hot, which probably meant blisters, but it also meant that the tempered glass would be just a little weaker than if it was room temperature. At least, Sansa hoped it would be, just like she hoped the spiderweb of cracks spreading from her point of impact meant that the glass was close to shattering.

“Come on, you bastard,” she grit out between her teeth - her shoulder was aching, both from the banging and the heat - before jumping one last time, and finally firing right through the window, into the observation room beyond.

Someone - probably Joffrey - shouted something in the dorm, but Sansa couldn’t hear it over her own coughing. She hadn’t realised quite how smokey it had gotten until she was out in the clean air, but there was heavy grey smoke pouring out through the hole she’d made in the glass - the hole that the others were all clambering through as well, only to drop to their knees and cough roughly.

Sansa, since she’d had a head start, was the first to notice Merlin, standing off to one side with his iPad and a frown.

As soon as they were all through and done with coughing, he cleared his throat so hard Sansa could see his Adam’s apple bob, and looked at them all over his glasses.

“You’ve _all_ failed,” he said, his voice hard. “The showers were a good short-term solution, but surely you noticed that the sprinklers weren’t coming on? Did none of you think to put out the flames?”

Sansa wanted to point out that Hoster had, but she couldn’t speak - her throat was still clogged with smoke.

“Well done on spotting the two-way mirror, Sansa,” Merlin admitted, which drew a hoarse guffaw from Joffrey.

“She’s probably seen plenty of them,” he muttered, and Merlin slammed his iPad down on the window ledge in response.

“Now is _not_ the time for laughing,” he snarled, “because when I said you all failed, I _meant_ it. You forgot the most important thing about working here at Kingsman,” he said, pointing through the now-huge gap in the mirrored glass, and Sansa felt sick.

Hoster must have smothered in the smoke while he was putting out the flames, and he seemed very small under the rain of the sprinklers, lying on the floor just beyond the foot of his bed.

"Teamwork," Merlin said, his voice shaking, "is a _vital_ part of any operation."


	4. War games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a minor cranial explosion, and variations on the theme of dogfights.

Dany had spent the past week reading up on conservationism and the sort of complex developmental economics in which Alyn Pycelle specialised, the better to be prepared for an interrogation, and she had made sure her body armour was the latest spec - she had a hunch about Professor Pycelle’s mysterious kidnappers, if only because of the precise manner of poor Lancelot’s death. Better be safe than sorry, on all counts.

Pycelle was older in person than he had seemed on the surveillance footage, unsteady on his feet and crook-backed, with a frankly ridiculous beard. He was also smaller than she had expected, which was a bonus - Daenerys’ diminutive status was often treated as a disadvantage, and while she’d long since gotten used to fighting people much, much larger than herself, it was nice to be able to look people in the face without giving herself a sore neck on occasion.

“Your paper on the benefits of solar fields in areas with higher than average daily sunlight was very interesting,” she said, stepping down into the lecture theatre with her umbrella hooked into her elbow. In truth, the paper had been boring and a little reductive, but that was not an opinion to open with. She did not wish to put the professor on his guard quite yet, after all.

“You read it?” he said, his delight as obvious as his surprise. “Why, I didn’t think anyone had read that! It was one of my early works in the field, quite simplistic and short-sighted - do come in, ma’am!”

Dany smiled graciously and came to stand before him, loosening the position of her umbrella just a little.

“I find your recent work to be more controversial, Professor,” she said, clicking her heels together - not hard enough to unleash her blade, of course, but enough to draw the professor’s attention more sharply - and smiling. “Your veritable _slew_ of papers on behavioural economics, for example, the sheer volume of which is impressive on its own, or, perhaps more controversially still, your part in covering up the death of a good man.”

Pycelle went very pale very quickly, and reached behind him, in search of his phone, Dany presumed.

“I- I have no idea what you mean! I had nothing to do with that- with _any_ death!”

“The man who was murdered while trying to save you was a good friend of mine,” Daenerys said, pressing closer, pinning the professor back against his lectern. “And I would like all the information you have about his death, and the man who killed him, please.”

“I know- I know nothing! Nothing at all!”

“Now, please,” Dany said firmly. “ _Right_ now.”

“I don’t know,” he all but sobbed, “I _swear_ I don’t-”

Dany only just got clear as his head _exploded_ , like a pinata of a rather gory persuasion, and she had hardly a moment to turn her shoulder for the window as she jumped - the two men in ill-fitting suits who had burst in brandishing guns had thrown some sort of modified flash-bang in her direction, and even Merlin’s latest body armour couldn’t protect her head from the sharp smack against the concrete colonnade outside the window.

 

* * *

 

“Dogs,” Joffrey said in disgust, looking at the cages in front of them as if the pups within had done him an insult. “We have to raise _dogs?”_

“Yes, you do,” Merlin said brightly, standing above them on a balcony, his iPad clutched to his chest as always. It had been a week of intense fitness tests since the night of the fire, starting with a ten-mile run. Sansa had kept fit by running with Arya and Rickon on Saturday afternoons while Bran had physical therapy, and swimming on Friday evenings when Bran had his other PT in the pool down the rec centre, but she’d still been near death after the run, led by some bastard in a plain black tracksuit, and she hadn’t been the only one.

A week later, and they’d done a second run, during which Shireen had told her all about the _dishy_ Prince Harrold of Sweden, who had been declared missing that morning - _the fifth such disappearance in a month,_ according to tabloid-hound Shireen, a facet if Shireen's personality which amused Sansa endlessly - and she’d been slightly less dead afterwards, but her calves were still aching now, the next morning.

The bloody jumpsuits they had to wear weren’t helping - she quite liked the boots, which were as comfortable as Dad and the uncles had always assured them actual military-issue combat boots were - because she’d never worn anything like it before. Sansa had always been a skirts-and-blouses kind of girl, and even her jeans had generally been the cute sort with detailing on the back pockets.

She set that aside for now - best worry about choosing a dog, since it was apparently important.

“Your dog will be your constant companion,” Merlin said. “You will train them yourselves, and keep them with you at all times during your training.”

Sansa knew right off which pup she wanted - too big, too gangly, and absolutely perfect. Scottish Deerhound were beautiful dogs, if a bit big and active for a shitty flat on an estate.

Her great-grandfather had bred them - she’d never known him, and Granddad had sold off all the dogs except his own gummy old Munchkin, who’d been nearly four foot tall - but that was all in the past. Maybe, someday in the future, Sansa could start up the family business again, or at least that small part of it.

Shireen chose a greyhound, as skinny and angular as she was herself, with a shiny black coat and sharp blue eyes. Sansa’s hound, when she coaxed the lovely little thing out of her cage and into a collar and leash, was as shaggy and blue-grey as Sansa could have hoped, with eyes a little too big for her face.

“I think we’ll call you Lady, shall we?” Sansa said, crouching down to scritch the pup between the ears. “What do you think, little Lady? Do you like it?”

Joffrey had pale-coated poodle, which he named _Goldfinger,_ like the dickhead he was, so Sansa and Lady kept near to Shireen and her Lightning, and they worked together even when the idiots thought it might be funny to gang up on them.

It happened more than she would have liked, really.

That day alone, while they were all finding feeding bowls and water bottles and beds and things for their dogs, Joffrey had decided to flex his funny bone by tugging the neck of Shireen’s jumpsuit wide and dumping a load of dry dog food down her back. Him and the others had all chortled away to themselves in their Oxbridge accents while Shireen calmly took off her boots and jumpsuit, shook out the dog food, and put back on her outer layer, but Sansa _seethed._

She hated bullies - she’d never had to deal with them before Dad and Robb were killed, but afterwards, before the money had run out and she’d still been at St. Andrew’s, while their faces were all over the news and the papers, while the redtops had been running imaginary scandals about the family which had always been answered with a lawsuit, at least until they couldn’t afford a solicitor anymore...

Things had gone sharply downhill, after Dad and Robb were killed. Sansa didn’t think it would have been as bad, had the police found their murderers, but the two cases were still open, and given the precise manners of their deaths - a single-car collision, and a fight gone horribly wrong at the end of Uncle Ed’s stag night - there were plenty who thought that maybe, just maybe, Dad and Robb only had themselves to blame, and that the cases should be closed. People didn’t like the idea of resources being wasted on two maybe-murders just because the victims were _Starks_ , and they especially didn’t like it when the Starks weren’t even _rich_ anymore.

Sansa really, _really_ hated bullies, and just because Joffrey and his cronies were her so-called teammates didn’t mean she had to let the jokes at her and Shireen’s expense go unpunished.

(Joffrey screamed like a Hitchcock heroine when the frog that had found its way into his pillowcase crawled out and hopped up onto his sleeping face. Goldfinger barked the dorm down, and that set all the other dogs aside from Lady and Lightning off, but Sansa thought the poor night’s sleep was more than worth it.

The bleach in his shampoo was also more than worth it, because his hair was not, apparently, that Vogue covershoot shade of golden blonde on its own. The lurid green streaks revealed by the introduction of chlorine bleach to his peroxide highlights proved that.)

 

* * *

 

Somehow, her vengeance drew more attention than Joffrey’s bullying - after the bleach incident, she was called into Merlin’s office for a conversation.

When she arrived, he was sitting with his feet up on the desk, crossed at the ankle - he had such long legs, she noticed, and then she noticed the gleam of not-skin shining above his left sock, and wondered what had happened that he had a prosthetic.

“Word’s come down from on high that you and I have a little chat, Sansa,” he said, glancing at her over his glasses. His smile was warm, and wry, and Sansa couldn’t help but smile in return - it felt almost like they were conspiring, against Joffrey and whatever higher-up had proposed him for the position, against the whole world, just for this moment - before taking the seat he gestured to, opposite his own. “It seems that someone disapproves of your hijinks.”

Sansa had gone out with a boy with a Welsh accent during first year of college, a beautiful boy with dark eyes and a shy smile, and in hindsight, she knew that at least part of the attraction had been the accent. That accent paired with the sheer depth of Merlin’s voice was enough to make her feel uncomfortably warm, in the best possible way, and she didn’t think there was any point in being embarrassed about it - so she embraced it. It was the closest she was likely to get to any canoodling while attending this program, after all, so she might as well make the most of it.

“While I, as your commanding officer, must disapprove as well,” he went on, taking his feet down to sit up, leaning over the desk with his hands clasped five inches from her own, “I will only do so in my official capacity. So, consider your wrist slapped, and pretend to be very penitent about it if any of the agents proper come down to check in.”

“And in your unofficial capacity?”

“Joffrey is not a very nice young man,” he said, something like a smile but more vicious turning his mouth up. “He’s targeting you because you’re Scottish, and Shireen because of her family history - don’t ask, thank you, you know full well I can’t tell you - and the others know who he is because they were all at Eton together, so they’re backing him. He frightens them, and he hates that he doesn’t frighten either of you, so he’s trying to bully you scared. I’m glad it isn’t working.”

“How can you be sure that Shireen and I aren’t fighting back from a place of fear?” she teased, folding her arms and leaning over them, ignoring a twinge in her hip from the arch of her spine - she’d landed hard in combat training the other day - in favour of raising an eyebrow in challenge. “How can you know that we aren’t living in terrible danger, the only two girls in a dorm of horrible boys, who’ve made clear their interest in making our lives as difficult and painful as possible?”

Merlin mimicked her position, and looked at her over his glasses again - this close, she could see that his eyes were deep green, laced with bright hazel, and they were wide and dark just now.

“Come now, Sansa,” he said, his low voice pitching lower than ever, right between her legs, “you and I both know you can handle a boy like Joffrey. You’ve handled worse _men.”_

That Merlin knew about Petyr would have embarrassed her, if she hadn’t known that Dany must have been the one to tell him - Dany would never have told him anything but the absolute truth, that Petyr was a creep and that Sansa had only stayed working for him for her family’s sake. There was no shame in that, so she refused to be even a little bit embarrassed.

“Consider yourself punished, Sansa,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything more to be said, do you?”

Surprising even herself - maybe _especially_ herself - Sansa smiled slowly and tipped her head to the side.

“Don’t you want to put me over your knee and spank me for being naughty?”

His laughter followed her out of his office, and it wasn’t until she got back to the dorm that the weight of what she’d said hit her square in the chest.

“Oh my _God_ ,” she groaned. “It really _has_ been too long since I got off.”

Lady, sitting at the foot of her bed, yipped, and Sansa took it as an agreement.

 

* * *

 

“How loathsome,” Cersei said in disgust, leafing through the stills Jaime had chosen from the footage of Pycelle’s death. “I do so hate to see something useful go to waste.”

It _was_ a waste, pure and simple, to see a mind like Alyn Pycelle’s destroyed so completely - a necessary waste, of course, since no one could be allowed to know their plans, not now - but she supposed it didn’t matter overmuch at this stage. Everything was so close to fruition that some silly girl hellbent on avenging her sugar daddy was hardly a _threat,_ after all.

Even so, that the girl had found them, had pinpointed just who had killed the old man… That was cause for concern.

“Find the girl, darling,” she said, reaching over her shoulder to press her nails into the taut edge of Jaime’s wrist. “For me? I’d feel safer knowing she was dead.”

“For you,” Jaime said, “anything.”

 


	5. A long drop, and a sudden stop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A very literal downward spiral, an awakening, and an ostentatious but low-key dinner party.

Shireen, apparently, was afraid of heights.

Sansa would not have said that discovering this during a test which involved their having to jump out of a plane was _ideal,_ but she had long since come to terms with things that were not ideal.

Coaxing Shireen to jump out of an airplane was nothing compared with making Rickon eat his peas so that they could have the wash up done before Mum got home.

“Come on,” Sansa encouraged her. “It’s not so bad! We’ve got parachutes and everything!”

The view was mesmerising, and they had prime position to enjoy it from their spot at the open cargo bay door - gloriously green countryside spread out below them like the quilt that used be on Mum and Dad’s bed, before they’d had to sell it, that blisteringly blue sky stretching out until it faded to milky white on the horizon, perfect rainbows of light shattering off the lenses of their goggles-

“Christ,” Joffrey sneered. “Trust a pair of girls to be too _afraid_ to do something as easy as this.”

He elbowed past them, dragging one of the other _wankers_ along with him on his quest for glory, even daring to make kissy faces at Sansa before he dived into the open sky below them, whichever twat he’d chosen this morning following him with a laugh.

Shireen hung back, letting the other pair of prats make the jump, and even then, she was holding on tight to the rigging.

“Now or never, Shireen,” Sansa said bracingly, snapping off a sharp salute and leaping, with a perfect form which would have _thrilled_ her long-ago ballet teacher, into nothingness.

Shireen followed not ten seconds later, screaming and with her eyes closed, and it took a good seven seconds more for her to open her eyes and realise that this really wasn’t so bad after all.

“I’m glad you’re all having such a nice time,” Merlin’s voice lilted through their earpieces, for once bypassing Sansa’s sex drive on its way to her brain - must have been all the adrenaline hammering through her system, because nothing else had stopped it yet. “But since a Kingsman agent must always be prepared for the unexpected, do try and have a care to catch whoever’s parachute is rigged to explode on deployment, won’t you?”

Sansa wished, for a fleeting second, that she could reach in and tug out her earpiece, because the clamour of everyone either screaming or swearing in their ridiculous accents was making it hard for her to _think._

“Everyone,” she said, as sharply as she could manage - fairly sharp, then, since it was the voice she used to shut Arya and Rickon up when they started bickering in the back of the van on the way home from Bran’s PT. “Shut the fuck up, all of you - everyone get as close in as possible, and join hands.”

“Why should we do as you say?” Joffrey shouted, and Sansa couldn’t quite keep from rolling her eyes. “What do you know-”

“I know that this is the best chance of us all getting to the ground safely,” she cut in, “and after what happened with Hoster on our first night here, I’m not bloody well risking a failure here, alright?!”

The others were already moving in, to her amazement, because they’d never damn well taken heed of anything she’d said before, not except Shireen, but the sharp reminder of Hoster's too-still body, lying there in the smouldering room as the sprinklers finally came on and doused the flames, Hoster's _corpse_ lying there, and the dull shame of Merlin's censure rattling around their chests with every cough, it all seemed enough to make them see sense in what she was telling them.

_Teamwork,_ after all.

She didn’t really know where to look when they made a circle holding hands, because these were four boys who she knew _hated_ her, and they were all watching her a little desperately.

“We go one at a time,” she said, meeting first Joffrey’s eyes, then Dickon’s, then Walder’s, then Leo’s, and finally Shireen’s, bluer than the sky and fiercely bright. “Start with Leo, go clockwise, count of three-”

Walder didn’t seem to like her plan, though, because he set off his ‘chute without waiting his turn - his ‘chute, which billowed starkly white against the sapphire depth of the sky above them.

“One down,” Sansa said cheerfully, even though her stomach was suddenly a mass of knots. “Right, Leo, go, three, two, one-”

Leo’s parachute was orange, hideously neon, and wonderfully present, and the knots in Sansa’s belly pulled a little tighter.

“Dickon, three-”

A little premature, but the flurry of acid green nylon meant that Dickon was safe, more or less.

“Hurry up, you three,” Merlin said in their ears. “You’ve only got about ninety seconds to release before it’s too late - go now, or crash land. It’s your choice.”

Sansa didn’t have a chance to say a word before Joffrey was snapping away from them, hitched up into the sky by crimson nylon and promising to never let any _plebs_ stop him from winning.

“Just you and me, then,” she said to Shireen, who’d gone from blazing focus to terrified whimpers. “Right, here’s what we do-”

It was the work of a few seconds to spin around so she could clasp both of Shireen’s hands, but every second counted and Shireen was not being very active in stalling their imminent deaths and expulsions from the programme.

“You first,” she said, “then me, alright?”

Shireen managed to nod, even against the slipstream, and tugged her ripcord while screaming in barely-audible range.

The nylon - or was it silk? At this range, it looked like the real thing - that spread behind her was bright, rich gold, and Sansa didn’t waste any time being pissed off that _she’d_ been given the exploding parachute rig. Was this her punishment for fighting back against Joffrey? Who knew, and who cared? Certainly not Sansa, who was busy wrapping her arms and legs as tight around Shireen’s long legs as she could.

They screamed the whole way down, and kept on screaming even when they were lying in the middle of the bright white Kingsman K limed into the lawn, even when Joffrey landed nearby and started swearing because his parachute was all tangled around his arms and legs.

They’d gotten themselves upright, calmed down, and tidied up a bit by the time Merlin emerged, iPad in one hand and an elegant cane of what Sansa thought might have been rosewood in the other. He was leaning heavily on it, wincing a bit whenever he stepped on his false leg, and Sansa wondered if it was the high pressure system they’d been talking about on the weather last night that was causing him trouble, or the slight yield of the grass underfoot as compared with the solid concrete and marble and wood of the floors inside.

“Walder,” he said, the vicious smile Sansa had become so fond of appearing as his glasses tinted dark against the sun that angled down over the manor. “You released far too early, and showed up all over the radar. Leo, Dickon, you both missed the K by a long shot - gather up your things, you’ve all failed. Go home, boys.”

He watched them leave, looking hugely amused, and then rounded on Sansa, Shireen, and Joffrey.

“All three of you remained off radar, and landed inside the K. Go ahead and wash up, you’re all free until your next assignment-”

“Hang about a minute,” Sansa blurted out, unable to stop herself. Smile of an angel or not, Merlin was acting as if it was no big deal that Sansa had been strapped to a bloody _bomb_ for this test. A _bomb! “_ Why is it I’m the fucking expendable one? Did some of the higher ups think it’d be funny to strap the Scot to a bomb, since I’m not _fucking_ English?”

“If you have an issue,” Merlin said, cool as a cucumber but also plainly _furious_ , “you don’t shout it to the whole world, understand? You come to me, discreetly, and you whisper it in my ear.”

Sansa marched right up to him, and wondered how she’d never realised that he was just enough taller than her that she could wear heels if they went out. Why they’d be going out she didn’t know, especially since she was currently _raging_ at him, but the thought was there, right alongside the thrumming of her heart in her throat, which had nothing to do with anger or adrenaline and everything to do with the sharp line of his jaw and the blaze of his eyes.

“Sorry, _sir_ ,” she hissed against his ear, biting down on a smile when he tensed. “But I’ve got a _fucking_ problem with being treated like spare _fucking_ parts-”

She hadn’t noticed his hand moving, but it must’ve done, because he had a free hand to tug the ripcord on her shoulder and-

_It’s silver-white_ she noticed through her shock, because yes, that was a parachute

\- then to grab her by the wrist, holding her upright against the pull of her ‘chute, tethering her nearer than was proper or professional. Her jumpsuit was tight, and made of some high-tech cloth that repelled the cold of the open sky, but it wasn’t made to keep out the warmth of an attractive, too-close body.

“You are _not_ expendable,” he growled, low and rough and hard, as if he wanted to tattoo the words into her mind. “You are not _spare fucking parts_.”

He released her as suddenly as he’d grabbed her, waited as if to be sure she didn't fall after all, and then nodded once, sharp as a salute.

“Go wash up,” he said firmly, looking as uncertain as she felt, just then. “You did well today.”

 

* * *

 

Dany had been lying in a coma ever since she was brought back from whatever top secret mission Sansa couldn’t be told about - they’d simply summoned her to Merlin’s office, where he’d been under orders to tell her that her mentor had been severely injured, and that she wasn’t to ask questions.

She’d asked, of course, and Merlin had chided her for it gently, and had taken the burden of the private mentorship the other candidates got from the agent who had proposed them on himself, which had meant enough long hours cooped up in his office with only him, Lady, and his shambling old bloodhound, Mutt, for company. She’d enjoyed those hours more than she should have, especially given her _real_ mentor was lying comatose in the medical bunker under the east wing.

Dany had been good at the mentorship thing -  she’d talked Sansa through ways to cheat the sexist pricks she had to deal with into giving her an advantage by convincing them she _needed_ one, and had enthusiastically backed her allying with Shireen as a friend, telling her stories of how she and Lyanna had done the same.

There was a strange, faraway look in Dany’s eyes when she talked about Lyanna, and Sansa couldn’t help but notice the same odd light there when she crashed through the door of Dany’s private medical room without knocking.

“It’s rude to enter a room unannounced,” Dany said mildly. “Lady’s training has continued well in my absence?”

Lady, as if to illustrate just how well trained she now was, settled on her haunches with a huge, toothy grin. She was massive now, and hairy enough that it took twice-daily brushings to keep her from shedding all over the place, but Sansa was so smitten she didn’t even mind.

“Very good,” Dany said, patting Lady’s head before returning to setting her hair into its usual deceptively elaborate braids. “And your own training?”

“Last three,” Sansa said, her casual shrug fooling neither of them - not that Dany seemed to mind, judging by the smug, slightly terrifying smile that revealed her unusually sharp eye-teeth. “Merlin reckons I have a decent chance of winning outright.”

“As well you should, as _my_ candidate,” Dany agreed, shrugging on a rich black silk robe embroidered with red dragons when a knock came at the door. “Do come in,” she called, slanting a very _significant_ look Sansa’s way, which Sansa gamely shrugged off in favour of turning to greet Merlin.

As always, he had his iPad clutched to his chest, but unusually, he did not return her smile.

“You’re dismissed, Sansa,” he said seriously, muscling in between her and Dany as if she was just another candidate, as if they hadn’t spent two hours the night before last giggling over old Tom and Jerry cartoons in his office. “Official business-”

“Let her stay,” Dany said easily. “Maybe a fresh set of eyes will help us figure out our little conundrum.”

Merlin looked like he wanted to argue, but Sansa had worked out that Dany was more or less second only to the mysterious Arthur within the organisation, so he conceded with unusually poor grace. Most of the time, he lost with a bashful smile, whether in a game of chess or a bet over how long it would take for Shireen to lace Joffrey’s poncy breakfast with laxatives _this_ time, but now he was scowling, a deep furrow between his brows and the set of his mouth leaving him actually looking his age, for once.

“We traced the signal that triggered the detonator in Professor Pycelle’s implant,” he explained, flicking something up onto the wallscreen - footage, Sansa realised, of the incident which had left Dany in the damn coma.

_“Jesus_ , Dany,” she exclaimed. “You blew up his _head?_ Don't you think that was a _bit_ fucking much?”

“I didn’t blow anything up,” Dany said, serene. “Explosives are not my area at all - incendiaries are, as well you know. Pay attention, Sansa. There will be questions afterwards.”

“It came,” Merlin grit out, sounding righteously pissed now, “from a transmitter owned by Casterly Inc. Doesn’t help us much, since the Lannisters own half of bloody _everything_ on the planet, right now-”

“Lannister?” Sansa asked, suddenly curious from a whole other angle. “As in _Cersei_ Lannister?”

“What about it?” Merlin asked. “Have you some _dazzling_ insight to share, Sansa?”

“Just that Cersei Lannister is probably in line for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize, given what she announced recently.”

Seeing the identically puzzled faces before her, she took Merlin’s tablet and hunted out the relevant footage from probably the most televised press conference of the year, if not the decade.

Cersei Lannister was Old Hollywood beautiful, all fine features and perfect hair and fierce, Katherine Hepburn fire in her sharp green eyes. Her twin, always at her side, was enough like her to be beautiful rather than handsome, and smiled only with his finely-shaped mouth.

“Free food supplements for all?”

“Not just food supplements,” Sansa explained, because she’d stayed up with Shireen looking into it just because they could. “They’re like, they’re for low-income families who can’t afford fresh fruit and veg, or fresh meat from a butcher - they account for all the vitamins and minerals you need, plus your protein, without the salt and sugar from processed food. As far as I know, there’s a carbohydrate component, too, so you feel full up after eating one. And she’s giving a year’s supply to _everyone_ who earns under a certain threshold each year.”

Dany and Merlin exchanged a very significant look, and Dany tugged the iPad out of Sansa’s hands so she could zoom in on Cersei Lannister’s brother’s neck.

“A scar, much like that which we noticed on Professor Pycelle’s neck, directly over the location of his implant,” she said quietly. “So the Lannisters are at it again, I see.”

 

* * *

 

The world, as Cersei saw it, faced many problems. She held the rather unpopular opinion that this could be solved by removing what she felt was the great unnamed source of these problems, that being poor people.

This was where her grand plans came in, of course. If the world was free of poor people, then there would be no one dying in the streets or clogging up hospitals or demanding things like _food to live on_ without _paying for it._

So she had decided to solve the problem, with the simple application of common sense: give those greedy, useless, lazy creatures exactly what they wanted, and turn it against them.

Casterly Inc. had been working on nanobot technology for ten years or more, and Cersei had ordered secret, off-the-books production, under Jaime's supervision. It was simple to launch a series of ranges of high-nutrient food supplements, diet pills, cheap painkillers, and energy drinks, fill them with nanobots primed to receive a special signal, and wait for the opportune moment.

Next week, in other words. For now, she had a dinner guest to entertain.

The only thing Cersei had ever wanted that she had been denied was a man, silver as Jaime was gold, more beautiful than anyone else Cersei had ever met.

Rhaegar Targaryen had married some Arab slut who'd nearly died in childbirth, and then he'd taken a stupid little Scottish bitch as a mistress, and she _had_ died in childbirth. Cersei had sometime wondered if she'd had a lucky escape, all things considered, but some small part of her still thought of Rhaegar with something dangerously close to regret - which was why she had agreed to this meeting. This girl, who'd arranged for a private audience via an intermediary with a foreign accent, was not Rhaegar, but she _was_ a Targaryen, and that name still garnered a strange sort of respect in elite circles that the Lannister name just _didn't._

Cersei wanted that respect almost as much as she wanted to save the planet, so she'd enthused - via Jaime, via this Daenerys' assistant - about having a dinner guest, and planned on introducing the Targaryen dynasty into her and Jaime's little cabal.

Why, if this went well, she might even share a glass of champagne with Rhaegar while the world devoured itself.

Daenerys had Rhaegar's ethereal beauty - the pale hair and skin, the livid purpleish eyes, that delicate bone structure - but none of his regality. Instead, she was tiny, elfin, and childish.

Had Cersei not known that his sister, from whom he was _not_ estranged, was her best path to Rhaegar - and his money - she would have laughed in Daenerys’ face and shut the door. Instead, she plastered on her best press conference smile, extended the hand of welcome, and drew a stranger into her and Jaime’s home.

“How nice to finally meet you,” she said brightly. “Everyone knows _about_ you, of course, but I don’t know a single soul who knows you.”

“I live a very private life,” Daenerys said bashfully, ducking her head a little. “I’ve never been interested in courting the public - I leave that to my brothers.”

Ah, yes, the _other_ brother. While Rhaegar had always been praised in the business world, the middle Targaryen sibling, Viserys, had been hounded by the gossip columns. Their blinding spotlights had made it easy for their little sister to hide in the shadows, Cersei supposed. She and Jaime had made sure of the same thing for the brat, after all.

“You must tell me how you became aware of our little project,” Cersei said, settling at the head of the table, smiling up at Jaime when he poured her a glass of her favourite Bourdeaux - a good match for the venison steaks she had ordered for the main course. She and Jaime had taken down a pair of deer only that morning, two fine bucks, and they had missed the third of the trio who stalked their private hunting grounds only by a hair. Cersei didn’t mind - the last remaining stag was a mangy thing, with a warier disposition than the others, and she was looking forward to a good, long hunt once all the excitement was over.

“Oh, one hears things,” Daenerys said, “when one moves in certain circles.”

Cersei’s mouth watered at the thought of being part of _those_ circles, where the true power of the world was brokered, and she managed another smile.

“From whom, though?” she pressed. “We have been keeping this rather… Under wraps, for fear of our competitors getting the jump on us.”

Daenerys rolled a sip of the wine in her mouth, smacking her rosy lips in consideration of both wine and question, and then nodded.

“Well,” she said, “Professor Pycelle _did_ give me some indication.”

Cersei’s smile froze, and Jaime’s false arm gleamed.

 


	6. Planes, trains, and automobiles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dancing, trainspotting, and a stop at the tailor's shop.

“I was well and truly rumbled then,” Dany admitted to Merlin. “Bitch started talking about spy movies, of all things - it’s coming down to do-or-die, I’m afraid.”

“Well,” Merlin said practically, “try and make it _do_ , Daenerys. We can't afford to cock this up, and you know it."

"I caught sight of this," Dany said, tapping her glasses and bringing up a photo on the wallscreen. It showed a skinny blonde boy, not unlike Jaime Lannister in looks, with a brochure for one of the many, many hate churches that the organisation kept an eye on in his hand. "And I managed to plant a bug as well, although I'm sure they won't find that, given that  _you_ designed it."

"Blowing smoke up my arse does not change the fact that we're fucked, Daenerys, unless the Lannisters show their bloody hand."

 

* * *

 

“Here,” Merlin said grandly, producing three photos from a large manila envelope and handing one each to Sansa, Shireen, and Joffrey, “is your target.”

The person in the photo was a man, maybe fifteen or twenty years older than Sansa, by her estimation, and probably not English, given that skin and those cheekbones and that daring open-collar shirt in a _fabulous_ shade of rich, reddish orange.

His eyes were dark, though, and wicked in the sort of way that Sansa had found exciting, before she found her tastes running in a different, more Welsh direction. _Damn._

“You are going to get close to your target,” Merlin said, all mischief and false dramatics, “and I do indeed mean _Biblically_ close. Whoever gets _closest,_ wins. It’s that simple.”

When Merlin was smiling like that, knowing and almost laughing, Sansa wouldn’t have minded getting Biblically close to him, but that wasn’t appropriate or helpful.

“Aren’t I a little _young_ for this sort of target?” Shireen asked, turning her photo to reveal the same man as in Sansa’s.

“And if Shireen is, I’m hardly in a better position,” Sansa pointed out, holding out her headshot and wondering if that was maybe the point.

“And don’t I have a bit too much penis for this job?” Joffrey demanded, flushing angrily as he did whenever someone dared to challenge his very narrow worldview. “I’m not _gay_ , you know!”

“Your target _is_ bisexual, however,” Merlin said cheerfully. “So your possessing whatever little bit of penis you do, Joffrey, is no obstacle to this job - you’ll each receive an envelope with a specific question to ask the mark, and if you do so and get the _correct_ answer in return, without tipping him off, then you get to hang on a little longer.”

Sansa was good at getting answers - from solicitors, from accountants, from Mum, from Arya, from cops, from Rickon, from Petyr, even from Bran - so she knew she could do this. She’d been doing this her whole damn life, it was part of life at boarding school, and at St. Andrew’s, and on the estate.

She smiled, wondering if she looked as half-crazy, wholly-delighted as Dany did when _she_ smiled, and sat back.

“Magic,” she said. “Can we get into town for some new gear?”

 

* * *

 

The club was dark, dry ice smoking the floor, neon lights showing up the vintage-style wallpaper and panelling.

Sansa’s dress was slim-fitting, bright-deep blue to bring out her eyes, split from knee to almost-knicker level to show off her legs, which were definitely her best feature, except maybe her hair. Shireen looked _ravishing_  in a slinky little gold and black striped number, her hair tucked and curled in a way that drew all attention to her magnificent eyes and none to her scarring, and Joffrey was, as always, an archetypical Old Boy, in his stupid mustard coloured trousers and his stupid crimson blazer. It clashed, and he knew it clashed, but he thought he was pretty enough to get away with it.

He wasn’t, in Sansa’s opinion, and she knew Shireen agreed with her.

Their mark was settled on a broad sofa with deep wine-red upholstery, in a shirt of similarly fabulous shade to that which he had been wearing in the headshot. Sansa could see the gleam of a gold chain around his neck, and a signet ring on his left ring finger.

Had she not been in the middle of fancying someone beautiful and inaccessible, she would’ve been very interested in him, but as it was, all her affections were tied up elsewhere.

Sansa hung back, ordered a drink - diet 7up, no sugar and no caffeine, because stimulants made her jumpy, and because the sweetness would balance the flute of champagne she was handed, and it gave the others a chance to get in and break the ice.

Joffrey jumped in headfirst, of course, brazening his way across the dancefloor and throwing himself down onto the sofa, sprawling in an inelegant mimicry of the mark’s louche splay of limbs. Something about the way the mark smiled over his glass at Joffrey reminded Sansa of Merlin, and she wondered if she had a type beyond “Welsh.”

Shireen slid into place next, glass of champagne in hand, offering shy, sweet smiles as a counter to Joffrey’s ostentation. Sansa watched for long enough to see just how the mark reacted to their different styles of flirtation, adjusted the drape of her hair, and drifted over.

Casual. That was the key. Casual, and as sexy as she could make herself appear.

She perched on the edge of the table in front of the mark, crossing her legs and leaning back on one hand.

“Sansa,” she said, smiling a little in response to his nod of greeting. “Is it just me, or does this champagne taste a little odd?”

“Not odd at all,” the mark said, rising fluidly to his feet and grinning. “Enjoy your evening, darlings, I have other plans to attend to.”

“I don’t feel well,” Joffrey blurted out, jumping up and running off in the opposite direction to the mark. Sansa watched him go, the sudden feeling that something was awry twisting her stomach up in knots, and looked up as a striking woman with the most amazing eyes Sansa had ever seen emerged from the crowd around them.

“Don’t worry about him, darlings,” she said, smiling slow and dangerous. “It’s just the rohypnol.”

 

* * *

 

Sansa woke up tied to what looked an awful lot like a train track.

_“Christ,_ ” she managed, spitting out hair and casting about for something she might use to escape. The ropes holding her down were thick and new, the ends tar-dipped to keep them from fraying and unravelling. Her wrists and ankles were already chafing, which was as annoying as it was sore, and there was nothing at all within her reach to help her break loose.

“Bollocks,” she managed, and then blinked in genuine surprise when her could-be date rapist appeared, elegant and lethal in a rich red silk dress under an absolutely gorgeous calf-length camel coat. “Who’re you, then?”

“Who I am is of no importance,” the woman said, shrugging one slender shoulder. “What is important is that you tell me what you know of the Kingsman organisation.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Sansa said, spitting more hair out of her mouth as the tracks began to rattle. Oh, _shit_. “I swear to fuck, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I know you’re lying,” the woman sing-songed over the rumble of the oncoming train. “Tell me what you know about Kingsman, dear! Tell me all about Daenerys Targaryen!”

“What the _fuck_ kind of name is that?” Sansa shouted, hysterical but unable to keep from protecting Dany - to protect Dany was to guarantee her family’s safety, wasn’t it?

“Fucking fuck,” she managed, “fucking untie me, you fucking psycho!”

“Is Kingsman worth dying for?” the woman asked, and Sansa screamed as hard as she could as the train barrelled-

Over her head?

By the time it had passed and the section of track to which Sansa was tied lifted back up to align with the rest of the track, Dany was standing by her feet, hands clasped over the hilt of a brightly shining sword and smiling.

“Shireen passed with flying colours,” she said cheerfully, slashing Sansa’s ties with two delicate flicks of her sword. “As have you, my dear - _very_ well done. Would you like to watch Joffrey’s turn? He’s next.”

Sansa took Dany’s proffered hand, and laughed through Joffrey’s horrified screams and inevitable cowardice while Merlin informed them that the mark and the woman were good friends of his who could be trusted implicitly for reasons he refused to specify.

Sansa suspected that they must be part of the organisation, possibly even that one of them was a Kingsman proper, but you didn't speculate about that sort of thing, not where the agents themselves might hear.

“You have some time free with your mentors,” Merlin said with a smile, “until the final test. Enjoy it, and come back refreshed and ready.”

Shireen's mentor was a tall, strong-boned woman, who wore her viciously red hair long and pinned away from her face with bright ruby pins. Sansa was glad she had Daenerys, who didn't look as if she spent her spare time setting fire to things, or people - although, Sansa knew Dany well enough at this stage to know just how much of a closet pyro her mentor was, and she half considered talking to Shireen about setting the two women up, before thinking better of it. Percival, Shireen's mentor, was too scary for Sansa to dare teasing her.

 

* * *

 

Daenerys’ home was a tall, thin townhouse, as elegant as her spindly Louboutins. Sansa fell in love instantly, and must have been fairly obvious about it, since Dany’s first words once they’d crossed the threshold were “Don’t worry, you’ll get one too, if you make the cut.”

Dany had a whole room wallpapered with all kinds of redtop front pages, but other than those - mementos of her successful missions, apparently - the overwhelming theme of the house was _dragons_.

“Our family has all sorts of origin stories,” Dany explained over her shoulder as she made tea. “Most of them involve dragons. I like the stories more than I like most of the family, so I went for those instead of family portraiture.”

Sansa didn’t really understand that -  the only member of her family she didn’t like was Aunt Lysa, who’d turned her back on them when things went down the shitter, and they’d had to sell most of the family portraiture, as well as most of the other artwork and heirlooms to pay their legal costs - but she accepted it as just one of Daenerys’ many quirks.  They were legion, and often weirder than anything Sansa had ever experienced in her life, but mostly, they were harmless.

“Now then,” Daenerys said cheerfully. “You’ve seen my headlines and my dragons, so it’s time for you to meet my tailor. After I teach you how to make a proper martini-"

"Daenerys," Sansa said calmly, "I've worked in a bar that has aspirations of grandeur and class for long enough to know how to make a martini. Let's skip to the bit where you bring me to the tailors, yeah?"

 

* * *

 

The tailor’s was old-fashioned, elegant dark wood wainscoting and deep green wallpaper walls and a polished walnut floor, and Dany fit right in. Sansa, still in her dress and heeled ankle boots from last night, felt out of place, as much an alien in this world as she had felt on her first day of training, a lone tracksuit in a sea of tweed blazers.

She felt like she _could_ fit here, though. She hadn’t, with the other candidates, but here, standing at Dany’s side, with a neat, bald man smiling in welcome, Sansa felt almost at home. It was a good feeling, one she'd lost after Robb was killed and she dropped out of St Andrew's, and it was so good to have it back, even just for now.

"Every Kingsman agent has a wardrobe of bespoke suits," Daenerys was explaining, "and while you'll be expected to look after that yourself once you join us properly, this is my treat. Made only of the finest cloth, it will fit you perfectly and protect you from any and all projectiles short of a short-range missile. Varys sews them personally, and stitches secrets into every seam."

"You're far too kind," the man, Varys, demured, but he looked enormously pleased by Dany's flattery. His suit was deep plum, his hands soft, and Dany marched right up to the desk and accepted his words without really acknowledging them, somehow. Sansa couldn’t decide if that was amazing or rude, and decided on both.

“If you’d be so good as to take care of the young lady, Varys,” Dany said, gesturing to the nearest door. “Standard issue suit, I think the navy with the blue pinstripe-”

“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,” the man said, “but fitting room one is occupied. Fitting room two-”

“Is unacceptable,” Dany said airily, “for a virgin to the measuring tape. Fitting room three it is, then - you may fetch us if fitting room one becomes available prior to our finishing our business in three, Varys.”

Fitting room three had the same understated wealth as the rest of the shop, and seemed perfectly normal.

"Is this it, then?" Sansa asked, knowing it couldn't be, and was rewarded with one of Dany's dragon smiles.

"Of course not," Dany said. "Just pull that hook to the right, dear."

Sansa did so, wondering if that wasn't a terribly easy switch to trip by accident, and revealed what looked very much like an _armoury._

"My God," she managed, wandering in and wondering how in the world this was safe to hide in an actual, functioning workspace.

"You'll have been told all of this in training, of course," Dany said, wandering over to to neat racks of shoes on one wall, "but I like to go through my favourites anyway, just to show off Merlin's handiwork. He's such a modest little mouse that he'd never do it himself, after all."

Sansa didn't think Merlin very modest, and he was most certainly not _mousy,_ but it would probably be inappropriate and indiscreet to say so, especially since she was still on something of an adrenaline high from the previous night's theatrics and didn't trust herself to stop.

"An Oxford, Sansa, is any formal shoe with exposed lacing. Of course, there are some modifications made to adapt them for a female wardrobe, such as the heels in my case - which I don't think you'll need, so..."

Daenerys passed her a pair of sleek tan leather shoes, two inch block heel and a high vamp which ended in a neat twin row of lacing.

"The additional decorative detailing as seen on some oxfords is called broguing, and the inelegance of it has given rise to our little password, which is-"

"Oxfords, not brogues," Sansa said, shaking her head. Personally, she liked the broguing, but she didn't say so. Maybe she could just turn up to work some day wearing a pair of brogues, if she got the job.

Dany hummed to herself as Sansa settled into the shoes, brushing her fingertips across the hardware in an oddly longing fashion, as if she wished she could use all of them at once.

"You know about our standard issue handgun, of course," Dany said, tapping the lower barrel, which fired a shotgun cartridge in desperate times, "and the umbrella - I was _very_ impressed with your weapons scores, especially given your absolute lack of combat training prior to your arrival here."

Everyone had been surprised by everything Sansa did well, except for her, and sometimes Shireen or Merlin. Sansa had been raised to do everything to the absolute best of her ability, though, so she felt that it was only to be expected when she kept up with and surpassed many of her classmates.

"The pen is a favourite of mine," Dany said fondly, "ever since I used it to execute the leader of a slaving ring. A minor miracle of chemical engineering, thanks to our labs - Merlin manages those on top of everything else, did you know that?"

"I've heard," Sansa said, wondering if she should admit to having seen the lab requisition orders awaiting Merlin's signature on his desk while he'd taken care of her during Dany's time out of action. "What's this pen, then?"

"It contains a highly potent poison, which is harmless until primed and activated via this pen," Dany said cheerfully, and Sansa wondered if that kind of casual attitude to murder was important to becoming a Kingsman. If it was, she and Shireen were fucked. "Very useful when you need to eliminate a target after a polite interrogation."

Sansa nodded in agreement, not sure what to say, and stood up in the most comfortable pair of shoes she had ever worn.

"My _God_ but you are tall," Daenerys said, craning her head back to look Sansa in the eye. With the heel of the shoe under her and her shoulders straight, Sansa was well clear of six foot, but Dany would never be anything but tiny. "Play Dorothy thinking of home for me, won't you?"

Sansa rolled her eyes, unable to keep from thinking of the old house that she missed so much as Judy Garland's voice echoed in her head, but clicked her heels together nonetheless, nearly falling over in surprise when a neat blade popped out from the toe of the right shoe.

"Neurotoxin," Dany said. "Very potent, so try not to touch."

"I'll bear that in mind," Sansa said dryly, tapping the blade against the skirting board to put it away. "Anything else to show me?"

"There are things in this world, my dear Horatio..."

Sansa kept the shoes on while Dany led her back out into the foyer, back to smiling Varys' desk. Apparently, Dany had supernatural timing, because just as they arrived, the door to fitting room one opened to reveal none other than Cersei Lannister.

She wasn't quite as beautiful in person - her haircut was a little too young, showed up by the perfect cut of her new suit, and her make up a little severe, like a classy version of Madonna's desperate attempts to regain her youth - and something about her face seemed terribly familiar, reminding Sansa of someone she just couldn't place. Her brother, standing just behind her, was mostly remarkable for the gold veneer of what was apparently a prosthetic hand.

"Daenerys!" Cersei exclaimed, sweeping forward to kiss Dany on both cheeks. "How perfectly darling to see you again!"

Something about that golden hand was making Sansa's memory twitch, but she couldn't quite place it, and had enough to worry about with Dany and this little... Detente.

“Charmed, Cersei, I’m sure,” Dany said her smile edged with razor-teeth but not quite showing them. “We must get together again soon, I _so_ enjoyed dinner the other night.”

Sansa kept her hands folded neatly in front of her, a stance learned during long, painful hours in courtrooms, and watched Jaime Lannister watch her.

“My personal assistant, Miss Stark,” Dany added, as though Sansa truly were nothing more than her PA. “Here for a uniform fitting - Varys, if you’d be so kind as to take care of the young lady, please? On my account, as usual.”

Sansa managed to catch Dany’s eye over the Lannister twins’ shoulders as Varys led her into fitting room one, but the door closed before she could do much else.

 

* * *

 

_“I am so looking forward to this being over,”_ Cersei’s voice came through the bug, transmitted to the set up in the back of Dany’s car. Sansa was still tucked away in Varys’ able care, isolated and insulated from this by necessity - she was not, after all, an agent proper just yet. _“It’s such an awful lot of effort.”_

_“For a marvellous reward,”_ Jaime’s voice pointed out. _“Just a little while longer, darling. Then we can decide how we want to shape the world, remember?”_

_“Oh, I know - I just wish this damned church trial was already over and done with.”_

“Getting that, Merlin?” Dany asked, fingers to the hinge of her glasses. “It seems I’ll need to borrow a jet - I’m sure my darling brother shan’t mind.”

_“I’m sure he will,”_ Merlin said, sounding as amused as he did worried, _“but you’ve never let that stop you before.”_

 


	7. Gundogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guns, dogs, and an awful lot of righteous fury.

To say that Sansa was surprised when Arthur himself summoned her would be an understatement. Shireen had been called out by Merlin while they were in the middle of an increasingly ludicrous game of tennis, and Sansa had felt at a bit of a loose end until one of the innumerable suited and faceless staffers from within the office block had come to fetch Sansa to Arthur’s private offices, which were apparently housed in the _exquisite_ rooms above the front door.

Sansa had never met Arthur before, of course - he did not involve himself in something so banal and menial as the training of recruits - but she knew more or less how such a man expected his subordinates to behave in his presence. She’d met enough politicians and judges and high ranking police officers over the years to know, after all.

“I was told you wanted to see me, sir?” she said, guiding Lady into the office with a tug of her leash. It was a massive room, wasted as an administrative office, but Sansa knew better than to comment on the decor at all - Dany had told her that few, if any, Kingsman agents appreciated having their taste critiqued in any way.

“Indeed, Sansa,” he said, turning his chair to look at her, taking advantage of her shock to point her toward a chair. _Jesus fuck but he looks like Dany,_ she thought, taking the sumptuous studded leather tub chair opposite his desk. “I’ve been very impressed by your showing in the trials, I must say. This is your dog?”

“Lady,” Sansa agreed, smiling down at Lady, who smiled back.

“After Lady Di, I suppose?” Arthur asked, the obvious condescension in his tone enough to make Sansa wary rather than nervous. “Or perhaps the former Duchess of York?”

“I might have been a bit more direct in that case,” Sansa dared, “but no, neither - it just seemed to suit her, from the moment I put a collar on her.”

Arthur’s smile was the same dragony grin as Dany’s, but without any of the humour or warmth.

“Quite,” he said. “A pleasing show of trust in your intuition - I have a similar test for you now, Sansa.”

He drew a gun from under his desk, a standard issue Kingsman handgun, and pointed it sharply into her face - and then let it spin around his finger, offering it to her grip-first.

Sansa took it, checking the clip before testing the weight and sighting along the barrel. “Nice gun,” she said. “Weighted a little differently than I’d expect from a standard issue pistol, but nice all the same.”

“Indeed,” Arthur said. “Now, shoot the dog.”

That was almost as startling as his resemblance to Dany, really, and Lady looked just as confused as Sansa felt.

“Excuse me?”

“Shoot” he said, “the dog. It’s quite simple.”

Sansa looked at Lady, and Lady looked at Sansa, and the blank cartridge she’d seen in the clip when she checked slammed into the exquisite mahogany floor.

“I knew it,” he said in disgust. “And I warned Daenerys to find an appropriate candidate - consider yourself _very_ firmly dismissed, Miss _Stark.”_

 

* * *

 

Sansa let herself into the flat with the key she’d kept tucked under the insole of her boot the whole time. It felt so strange to be back here, after the Spartan luxury of the dorm at Kingsman HQ, after the space in the gardens, after the _huge_ array of _fruit_ at mealtimes…

But here, there was no question of her having to murder anyone, and even if she _did_ now have to worry about feeding Lady as well as helping Mum, well, she could manage. Arya would just have to scrounge that extra fiver for housekeeping from somewhere herself.

The flat had been empty when she and Lady arrived, but by the time they’d settled into her corner of the room she shared with Arya and Mum, Rickon was home from school.

“Why in the world are you home alone?” she demanded, rattling into the kitchen with Lady on her heels. “The others won’t be home from college for a couple of hours, and Mum has tutoring right through until seven or eight, you _know_ you’re supposed to-”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I- I didn’t get the job. I’ll be getting severance pay, so we don’t have to worry about that, but-”

“But you’ve been gone for _four months_ , Sansa,” Rickon said angrily. “We didn’t know if you were alive or dead - we’ve had to rely on _Uncle_ Petyr all the damn time! Did you know he and Mum _grew up together?!_ ”

“Petyr and…”

After all Dany’s little talks about dealing with inappropriate attentions from older male agents, and all that time spent in close quarters with a man to whom she was very, _very_ attracted, and who she was almost certain was attracted to her, well, Sansa understood some things a little better.

“You stay here,” she said to Rickon, stamping into her boots, tucking the gun she hadn’t given back to Arthur into the back of her waistband and sticking her keys into her pocket. “You lock the door behind me, you put the catch down, and you do not let anyone in. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve sorted this _bollocks_ out, alright?”

“Sansa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you-”

“I’m not upset with you, pet,” she promised him, reaching up to pat his cheek and marvelling at how big he’d gotten. “I’m upset with _me._ But I’m going to set everything to rights, I swear.”

She whistled for Lady, who came trotting out of the bedroom with her leash in her mouth, and gave Rickon a big, tongue-lolling smile as Sansa clipped on her leash and ruffled the fluffy hair between her ears.

"We'll be right back, Rick," Sansa promised, giving Rickon a smile of her own, and then they were gone.

The walk to Petyr’s apartment wasn’t long - he lived off the estate, but only just, not far from his office and the caff - and Sansa stomped the whole way there, furious to her very bones, and kicked as hard as she could on his front door.

“I- Sansa! Hello, darling, long time no see-”

"What's this I hear about you and my mum?"

Lady was leaning forward, lip curled back over her gleaming teeth in a snarl, the sort she usually reserved for Joffrey and Goldfinger, and Petyr darted a glance at her in surprise and, Sansa hoped, fear.

"Your mum and I go way back, you know that," he said lightly, a laugh in his voice. "Sansa, come on now, you  _know_ Cat and I have been friends for _years-"_

Dad was the only person who had ever called Mum _Cat_ , that Sansa ever heard - oh, Aunty Lysa had sometimes, when she was screaming at Mum and calling her  _perfect Cat,_ and Uncle Edmure still sometimes called her  _Kitty Cat,_ a hangover from his being so much younger than his sisters, and Granddad and Uncle Bryn had always called her  _Little Cat._

But  _just_ Cat? No, that was Dad's.  _Just_ Dad's.

"She and I were always close," Petyr said wistfully, shaking his head. "If it hadn't been for your father's family being who they were, and your grandfather being so  _stubborn,_ well, your name might be Sansa  _Baelish_ , little bird."

Lady's hackles raised as Sansa lifted her foot back, and she cut off the start of Petyr's next false remembrance of his childhood relationship with her mother with a sharply placed kick to the bollocks, and waited for his knees to smack to the ground before she brought her own knee up into his chin.

“If I _ever_ hear of you taking advantage of my mother, or _anyone_ else, you scummy little piece of _shit_ , I will destroy you.”

He stayed down, which Sansa considered a good idea, and even coughed a little, which she felt was a nice touch.

“You can send any of your goons you like after me,” she hissed. “I’ll be ready, no matter which of the heavies comes after me, you hear? I’ll fucking _end_ you, Baelish.”

His door clinked against his expensive, overlarge watch when he reached a hand out toward her, but Sansa and Lady were already halfway to the steps that led back down to the street by the time he croaked out her name.

“I called Mum,” Rickon said, after she let herself in home. “She’ll be home in half an hour, if you’re still around to see her.”

“Of course I’ll be here to see her,” Sansa said, throwing her arms tight around him. “I’m back to stay, Rick - I’m not leaving unless I have to, I promise.”

He was taller than her, which he _hadn’t_ been, and it scared her to think that she’d missed so much in so short a time.

And how had she never understood the way Petyr looked at her, all that time? She’d been creeped out by him, had known he was attracted to her, but _lots_ of creepy old men looked at her that way - had she been thinking properly, had she put the way Petyr looked at her with the way he talked about Mum, she might have gotten control of the situation sooner, and-

“Where’ve you _been?”_ Rickon asked her, pushing her away carefully and turning to put on the kettle. “Mum told us you’d gotten some kind of job, but she didn’t know what you were doing, and she nearly shit herself when your first month’s pay arrived in her bank account-”

Sansa hadn’t known she was being paid for the trials and training, and she half suspected that Daenerys had finagled something from her own pocket, which made her feel _incredibly_ guilty for stepping out so quickly when Arthur told her to go.

“I don’t know if I can talk about it,” she admitted. “It was a government. Thing. I don’t know, Rick, it was…”

It was a life she wanted to live, she knew, ruffling Lady’s shaggy ears. She’d settle back into this shithole of a flat, working herself half to death until they got Arya and Bran and Rickon through college and into the world, and then, maybe, if she and Mum could get a handle on all that debt, she could go back to college herself, maybe get work in a GP’s office nearby so she could be close to Mum still, even though the others would doubtlessly move all over the world, excelling at everything they chose to do.

She’d stay here, and wish she’d been reckless enough to fire a blank at Lady, rather than _near_ Lady, and dream of a world she couldn’t touch, and help Mum. She’d be Robb’s substitute, and never quite fit the role, and maybe she’d marry a nice boy with curly brown hair and glasses and a gently lilting Welsh accent and pretend she wasn’t marrying him because he reminded her of someone who might have been, from something that might have been.

Sansa was good at disappointment. She could handle this.

 

* * *

 

Dany was what might, perhaps, be considered _absolutely fucking raging._

Sansa was an excellent candidate, skilled in all the necessary areas and with bags of potential. Perhaps not an ideal Lancelot, who was by tradition quite traditional, but absolutely an ideal _agent._ Dany rather liked the idea of bringing Sansa in as a squire, which she thought she could get away with, given Rhaegar’s _insufferable_ habit of reminding them all that _Kingsman agents are the modern knights_. Young Shireen had much more of Lancelot's spirit about her, but Sansa...

Sansa had the dedication and sense that was a hallmark of Galahad agents. She was made to be Dany's heir, and bugger Rhaegar for thinking otherwise. He’d been a Percival, before becoming Arthur, and embodied that stupidity so inherent in so many Percivals before him, the stubborn refusal to bend and acknowledge that perhaps they were not always _right._

Melisandre was like that. Dany knew _intimately_ just how stubborn the current Percival was, but she also knew that Melisandre d’Asshai was able to mould her belief in her own rightness to the circumstances she found herself in, which made her more effective and longer-lived than any Percival before her. Melisandre was terrifying in her capability, and in many other things, but Dany loved her all the same, and liked her a great deal more than she did Rhaegar, to boot.

Sansa had it in her to be just as powerful an agent as Melisandre, or Daenerys herself - if not Galahad, then perhaps Bedivere, loyal and true right to the end of it all, as Sansa proved herself when her father and brother were murdered, when she was tied to those train tracks and did not flinch toward telling the truth for even a moment.

Dany had had Merlin dig into Eddard and Robb Stark’s deaths, and there was a file waiting for her on her desk at home which she intended on bringing to Rhaegar as soon as she could, as payment for his treatment of Sansa, as payment for his treatment of Lyanna, of Elia and Aegon and Rhaenys and Jon and Mother and Viserys. Rhaegar had plenty of sins for which he had to atone, and finding who had killed Sansa’s father and brother would be only the start of that.

None of that took away from Dany’s fury that Sansa had simply _given up._ She’d walked away from HQ without looking back, stealing a _bloody_ car from the garage under the east wing and driving all the way to _fucking_ Edinburgh without stopping except at a rest stop, for just long enough to have a wee - Dany had checked the GPS data, with Merlin hovering at her shoulder like a mother hen, scrubbing at his untidy hair and fretting incessantly. Dany had seen the hints of _something_ between her cadet and her friend, but she hadn’t realised quite how deep it went, at least for poor Merlin. He’d been beside himself once he noticed that she was gone, as worried as Daenerys was angry, and he’d activated Sansa’s tracker as soon as it became clear she’d abandoned the car.

Now, it was just a case of getting into the _shithole_ she and her family still called home, despite a number of strings Dany had previously been able to pull, and then she could bully Sansa into realising that there would be a place for her at Kingsman for as long as Dany sat at the table.


	8. Returns and departures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An argument, an experiment, and a fire.

Mum was just in, her scarf still hanging loose around her neck, when the hammering started on the door.

Sansa assumed it was some of Petyr’s goons . He wasn’t a man to let something like that go unpunished, so drew her gun from her waistband before answering. Better be safe than sorry, after all.

Mum and Rickon both made noises of surprise and horror at the sight of her gun, but that wasn’t what mattered now. What mattered just now was buying herself a few extra seconds to get the jump on whatever bastards Petyr had sent for her, and the sheer sight of a gun in her hand would surprise them enough to do that.

She’d even changed the clip before she left HQ. She and Lady had made a stop at the dorm and grabbed a whole load of things, including half a dozen clips that she’d managed to sneak away from the shooting range just in case Joffrey got a bit too rowdy some night.

It was Sansa’s turn to be surprised when she swung open the door and stepped back sharply, gun raised, to reveal a very pink faced Daenerys.

“You and I need to have a _very_ serious talk,” Dany said, her voice as sharp as her smile usually was. “About my brother’s mistake, and- why in the _world_ do you have Rhaegar’s gun, Sansa?”

“He wanted me to shoot my dog with it,” Sansa said, lowering her hands and gesturing for Dany to come in. “I forgot to give it back. Mum, Rickon, this is Miss Targaryen, my former mentor at the programme-”

“ _Current_ mentor,” Dany said, turning to Mum. “There was a mistake - you know how it is, Mrs. Stark, higher ups thinking they can run the practical end of things, when really they’ve been so bogged down in paperwork for so long that they wouldn’t be able to do a thing for themselves-”

“What kind of programme _is_ this?” Mum demanded, one arm out to push Rickon behind her. “Is this- are you part of those people who killed Lyanna? Is _that_ what this is?”

“I had nothing to do with Lyanna’s death,” Daenerys grit out. “She was my closest friend, and had there been _anything_ I could have done to save her, I would have done it. I have done everything I can ever since to honour her memory, and wish every day that it was not just her memory that I had to keep.”

Sansa finally understood the catch that hitched Dany’s voice whenever she spoke of Lyanna, and felt terribly, helplessly sad for Dany, who apparently knew something of Mum’s pain.

“Sansa was never in the same danger Lyanna was, in the end,” Dany went on. “I would never allow that. It was not in my power to save Lyanna, but I _can_ save Sansa. I _have_ saved Sansa.”

Sansa hadn’t considered it like that, but when Dany said it so bluntly, it made her angry. Was that why she had been chosen? As a charity case?

_An experiment,_ Joffrey had called her, way back on their first day. Had he been right? Had she really just been there as a test?

“She is one of the most capable young people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting,” Daenerys said, completely to Mum, all but ignoring Sansa and Rickon. “While she has proven unsuited for the position for which I initially put her forward, there are a multitude of other positions in our organisation for which she is _perfectly_ suited. Mine, for example, when I retire.”

Mum was eyeing Dany the way she eyed up solicitors, or disagreeable parents of horrible little shits of children, or Sansa and the others when they acted out.

"And how am I to believe that she's safe in the same organisation that killed her aunt when someone _higher up_ wants her out?"

"You can't," Dany said simply. "But you can believe that she will be doing good work, and that she will be well rewarded for that work."

 

* * *

 

It was the most awkward half a day Sansa had ever spent in a car.

Dany had, with Mum’s blessing, herded her outside into a waiting car, with a neatly suited man who Dany introduced as Rakharo behind the wheel, and then had sat staring out the window the whole way back to London. Sansa wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, or her, and just kept her hands clasped tight in her lap and tried not to fidget too much. Her knee was a little tender where she’d hit it into Petyr’s chin, and she half wondered if maybe she’d done more damage than she’d intended, before deciding that it served him right. Maybe, with some luck, he’d bitten through his silver tongue.

When they finally reached Dany’s house in Kensington, Dany just about let her through the door before letting loose.

“What the _ever-loving shit_ are you thinking, losing the best damned career you’re likely to have over a bloody _dog?!”_ she shrieked, and Sansa took a step back in pure surprise. She’d always guessed that Dany had a temper, but to actually see it was a little scary.

“I wasn’t going to risk hurting Lady just for a _job_ ,” Sansa said, aware that her voice was a little cool and not giving a shit. Dany wasn’t her boss anymore, which meant she didn’t owe her deference, only respect, and even that only so long as Dany didn’t do anything ridiculous. “And this _is_ a job, Daenerys, one that only _you_ wanted me to get.”

“Not _only_ me,” Dany said furiously. “Do you realise how _huge_ it is that we have a female Lancelot, Sansa? That the final two candidates for the position were _women?_ And not even women from good Anglican English families who can trace their ancestry back to William the bloody Conqueror, but a Scot and a Catholic? Have you _any_ idea?”

“I- no. What?”

“Kingsman is stuck in the past,” Daenerys said, stomping deeper into the house. “And _some_ of us are trying to _change_ that - and your little display just made our jobs all the harder! And over a _fucking_ dog!”

“So what, you shot a dog for a job?” Sansa said in disgust. “Pull the other one, Daenerys, even a blank will cause enough damage to kill most dogs, and you know that. I know you’re cool with violence, but you’re not a fucking sadist.”

“No, I’m not,” Dany said. “But you can be _damned_ sure that I shot my dog.”

She threw open the door to what was apparently a loo, and Sansa didn’t quite know what to make of the long-legged borzoi with the dark black coat and russet-red socks, stuffed and arranged in the corner, keeping careful watch over whoever was doing their business.

“Drogon and I lived very happily as roommates until he died two years ago, Sansa, because he _dodged the blank_ , because, if you remember, that’s what Kingsman dogs are _trained to do!”_

She hadn’t really considered that, when Arthur had told her to shoot a gun into Lady’s face. Bollocks.

“Look, Dany-”

“I have never been so _baffled_ in all my life as I was when Merlin told me you’d just _run away!_ ” Daenerys shouted. “I thought you might stand and _fight!_ ”

“Against who, Dany?” Sansa said, exasperated and a bit weirded out by their having this argument in the loo. “Against Arthur, who heads up one of the shadiest, most dangerous organisations in the _world?_ Or against everyone in the whole of HQ who didn’t want me there because I’m Scottish? Or because I’m poor? Or because they know what happened to my aunt, and I don’t, and they think I’ll ruin something like she apparently did?”

Dany deflated then, and Sansa wondered if she’d overstepped by bringing Lyanna into it. She followed anyways, when Dany stepped into the hall and then into the kitchen.

“I know what happened to Lyanna,” she said, “and I know _exactly_ where the blame falls, and it was _not_ with her. You could not ruin something “like her,” because she did not ruin anything. My brother did. Rhaegar was already Arthur when Lyanna and I were put forward for my position, and he wanted to keep the organisation _pure_. Lya was a Scot, and a woman, and while he could bend enough to allow me in, because I was a Targaryen, Lya… No. So _he_ ruined _her_.”

Before Sansa could ask just what that meant, Daenerys charged up the stairs to her office.

“Here is a log in to my secure line,” she said, tapping away at her computer and then pushing Sansa into the high-backed swivel chair behind the desk. “You will remain in this house until I come to collect you, understood? You will be in contact with me and with Merlin the entire time, and I expect you to _remain_ in contact with us both.”

“What? Where will you be?”

“A horrible church in America, where they hate people like me,” Dany said, and Sansa couldn’t hide her surprise. _Horrible churches in America_ tended to like rich white English people like Dany. “I am, after all, a _lesbian_ , Sansa, and bad girls like me go to Hell. Now _sit down_ , unless you need to take a wee.”

Sansa sat, and watched through the door as Dany dashed this way and that, eventually disappearing down the stairs with a shout of farewell and a neat little carry-on suitcase.

_“Sansa?”_

“Hello, Merlin,” she said, slipping her glasses back on - she’d kept them in the zippy pocket on the inside of her jacket, for some stupid reason, and was glad of it now. “Anything exciting happen since I’ve been away?”

_“Why did you leave like that?”_ he asked, ignoring her admittedly shoddy attempt at smalltalk. _“You should have come to me, or gone to Dany - there’s more to Kingsman than the agents who sit at the table, Sansa, you know that.”_

Truthfully, she had known that, just like she’d known that Lady would dodge the bullet, and that Arthur hadn’t wanted her there in the first place, and that Shireen was a better fit for Lancelot than she could ever be - but that didn’t mean she agreed that she’d done the wrong thing.

“I know that, Merlin,” she said softly, wishing he was here instead of a wireless connection away. “But maybe I just don’t-”

_“Like fuck you don’t,_ ” he said sharply. _“Go get something to eat, I’ve got work to do, but this isn’t over. We’re going to talk about this later._ ”

 

* * *

 

Sparrow’s Nest Church was a simple white building with a red tiled roof. Daenerys had seen a million other churches just like it, dozens of them between here and the airstrip, and knew what she’d find inside. A festering pit of hatred and bile was not where she would have liked to spend such a lovely afternoon, but she didn’t see that she had much choice.

As expected, the inside was peopled by conservatively dressed women and men in check shirts. Her sense of style wanted to curl up and die, but she took her place in a pew a little way up the aisle, pausing to adjust her neatly fitted skirt and the collar of her red silk blouse as she settled.

The lady next to her, a bland woman with a terrible haircut, sniffed disapprovingly before turning back to focus on whatever bile the pastor was spouting. Dany listened with half an ear, more concerned with figuring out just what the Lannisters had planned.

Merlin had figured out the secret, the nanobots, but hadn’t been able to understand just what they _did._ It seemed to Daenerys that there were too many possibilities, especially when the various disappeared celebrities and the temporarily disappeared academics like Professor Pycelle were taken into consideration, and she didn’t like it one _bit_.

The nanobots being more sophisticated than anything Kingsman had on the books had made both her and Merlin _very_ nervous, too, but Rhaegar had assured her that there was no cause for undue concern. He’d promised her that he had it under control, that he, as Arthur, had the best interests of the organisation and, of course, the world at heart, and that he would take care of everything.

Since she’d brought Sansa in, Dany had been thinking of Lyanna a great deal more, and that had made her wonder if Rhaegar had anyone’s best interests at heart at all, besides his own.

Rhaegar’s son by Lyanna, Jon, had lived with Dany’s mother for most of his childhood - Mummy had spoiled him rotten, and doted on him more entirely than she had even on Dany, but the moment she had died, Rhaegar had spirited him away to some boarding school on the continent, and had locked the system down so Dany couldn’t _find_ him. Had she been able to, she would have brought him to the Starks, so that he might know family who loved him and who could keep him safe, but Rhaegar had never wanted anyone to know about his little _shame_ in any detail. Most people didn’t even know that Jon had been a boy, never mind anything else.

Unless, of course, they were Cersei Lannister. Dany remembered how Cersei and her family had always been sniffing around, before Rhaegar married Elia, and even afterwards, until Father died, because while she’d never been allowed to sit at dinner while Father was alive, she _had_ been permitted to watch, through the eye-holes in the portraits around the dining room.

Cersei had always known everything about Rhaegar, Dany remembered, and a sudden feeling of dread overtook her as she wondered if, after all these years, Rhaegar was finally taking notice of the woman who had wanted so desperately to lay claim to him, back in the day.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” she said, rising and moving to exit the seat. The blandly dressed woman rounded on her, face twisting in some odd combination of rage and maternal disapproval, and Dany reached unconsciously for her gun.

“You’d be better just sitting down and listening to what the pastor has to say,” she hissed, not moving one inch, and Dany wondered what had given her away - her accent? The luxurious fabrics of her suit and blouse? Her elaborate hairstyle? Any or all of them would mark her as a rank outsider in this place, and that was without going near any of her more _private_ differences.

“If I may, madam,” she said, crouching just a little, so her mouth was at the woman’s ear, “I am a Maegorian call girl, late to a meeting with my foreign R’hllorian girlfriend, who works as an abortion technician at the Firestone Clinic in the next town over.”

The woman looked as though Dany had spewed a stream of violent curses, which was deeply amusing, so she smiled widely.

“Good afternoon, and have a _lovely_ day, madam,” she finished, pushing past the bitch and moving into the aisle.

Then the buzzing started.

 

* * *

 

Cersei settled in to watch, relaxing into the weight of Jaime’s hand on the back of her neck as Daenerys Targaryen rounded on the ugly woman behind her.

“This ought to be enormously fun,” she commented idly, sipping a glass of red wine and smiling. “I have _so_ been looking forward to the test run.”

What a clever little imp Tyrion was! To be _able_ to include microtransmitters and microreceivers in something so small as a nanobot was one thing, but to make them sensitive enough to pick up on _satellite_ signals, rather than short-range radio? If he weren’t so intelligent, she would have drowned him like a blind kitten years ago!

Jaime might have objected to that, at first, but Cersei knew how to convince Jaime she was right. It never took much effort, really.

What was taking a great deal of effort was remaining in her seat - she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so thrilled, because she couldn’t imagine anything so thrilling as watching pretty little Daenerys shooting twenty people, and then turning to improvised weaponry to kill a further thirteen, by Cersei’s reckoning.

“She’s a marvellous athlete,” Jaime said, sounding surprised. It was a little surprising, Cersei supposed as they watched Daenerys spring high over a pew and land with a roll, spinning upright and bringing her elbow into the nose of a pimple-faced boy of seventeen or eighteen. “And Tyrion is a marvellous engineer. It looks like we have one hundred percent effectiveness, darling.”

“Not a person in the world can have gone without our products,” Cersei sighed. “This is _marvellous_ \- and, as proven by your not having any desire to dismember me, the implants work perfectly, too.”

The implants were another stroke of what Cersei reluctantly admitted to being genius on Tyrion’s part - they were inserted under the skin, below the ear, and worked as signal jammers, blocking the broadcast from the nanobots, as well as a means to eradicate anyone who might have turned their cloak at this late stage of the game.

“Goodness,” Jaime said, an edge to his voice that drove Cersei to lick her lips. “I didn’t expect _that.”_

_That_ turned out to be Daenerys Targaryen, delicate, ethereal Daenerys, who had used up all her bullets and was the last woman standing against a gathering of blood-crazed men twice her size, pouring what Cersei thought to be wine all over the altar cloth, and then knocking a stand of candles over on top of it.

“The whole place is made of wood,” Jaime said. “She’s committing _suicide,_ Cersei.”

 

* * *

 

Inside the church, and sensible once more, Daenerys did her best to spread the flames as the last few survivors beat one another to death - she couldn’t risk something that could cause even her, with all her training, to become a raging berserker to go public, not before they had a chance to counter it back at HQ.

As she had so many times before, Dany put her life in Merlin’s hands, and she vaulted across the tumbled pews, dragged her discarded umbrella from the wreckage, disregarded any knowledge about the felicity of putting an umbrella up indoors, and hoped for the best as the beams supporting the roof gave way.

“You’d better beat them, Merlin,” she said, and then the walls came tumbling down.


	9. His cup runneth over

Sansa didn’t remember getting to the tailor’s shop - she only half remembered Merlin’s roar of anguish, almost drowning out her own scream, when the signal from Dany’s glasses fizzled out. After that, Merlin had cut their link amidst a stream of cursing and what sounded terribly like sobs, and Sansa had sunk into a shock not unlike the one that had consumed her after Dad and Robb were killed.

She did remember finding the file marked _For Sansa_ after she threw the laptop off Dany’s desk, and she did remember reading the whole thing. Dad working to the top of the Labour Party, in line to become PM if - not if, when - Labour won the election, and certain people deciding that they couldn’t have a _Labour Scotsman_ as PM, not when there was a perfectly serviceable Tory from Kent who could do the job. Robb, ferreting out the truth of who’d been behind Dad’s murder, and _Jaime Lannister_ organising a hit.

That was why the golden hand had been so familiar, she knew. She’d seen it in evidence photos, pictures of the crowd who’d gathered to watch Robb choke on his own blood in Edmure’s arms, there on the side of the street.

Now she knew who’d killed Dad and Robb. She knew who’d arranged it.

Most importantly, she knew who’d arranged to have the whole thing covered up.

The shop was just the same as it had been when last she was here, with Dany. Varys still stood behind his desk, tape measure draped around his neck in what she suspected was pure affectation, rather than practicality, and he merely pointed her towards a corridor Dany had not shown her the last time.

It led to a dining room, or a conference room that _looked_ like a dining room, which held Arthur.

Arthur, who she suspected was in league with the Lannister twins, because he had helped their father cover up her father’s and brother’s murders.

“Dany is dead, Arthur,” Sansa said, hoping she sounded less empty than she felt, more grief-stricken. “She’s _gone_.”

“And we have made a toast in her honour,” Arthur said, looking bizarrely unaffected considering Dany had been his _sister_. “But perhaps another is in order, since she was so fond of you. Come, sit.”

Sansa took the seat to his left, where Dany had sat, and watched him closely as he poured a measure of brandy each into two crystal tumblers from a crystal decanter with a gold rim. It was all so lush, so extravagant, that Sansa might have been distracted by it, four months ago.

Now, she was too angry to care about the luxury of it all. Now, she noticed Rhaegar’s pen.

“You really did make a good showing in the trials,” he said, setting a glass in front of her and sitting down, fussing with his suit for a moment. He had a different sort of elegance to Dany’s, and a confidence in his movements that grated on Sansa, somehow. “I am almost tempted to put you forward as Daenerys’ replacement.”

“Almost,” she agreed. “All these were Arthurs, I presume?” she asked, gesturing to the portraits of arrogant looking men lining the walls. “Your predecessors?”

“Indeed,” Arthur said, smiling over his shoulder at the nearest, a hard-faced man with oddly similar features to Arthur’s own. _My God,_ Sansa thought, _is that their father?_

She spun the small silver plater he’d set the glasses on while he was looking away, and hoped she’d done the right thing.

“To Dany, then,” she said, when he turned back around

“To Daenerys,” Rhaegar Targaryen echoed, before he drank what Sansa hoped was the poison. “And now,” he said, pulling his pen from his breast pocket, “I want to know if you understand what this is.”

“Dany showed me,” Sansa assured him. “A poison pen. Clever of Merlin.”

“You see, Sansa,” he said, flicking the clasp and priming the poison. “Sacrifices must always be made, in the pursuit of the greater good. I will miss Daenerys, but she was too close to halting a world-changing endeavour to allow her to live. She would not have changed her mind, and so she had to die.”

“Just like hundreds of thousands of other people will,” Sansa said, unable to hide her disgust, her _fury._ “But they’re poor, like me, so they don’t matter, do they?”

“Now, Sansa,” he chided, as if scolding a naughty child, and she felt sick, remembering Merlin chiding her in much the same way, but with more warmth and _respect_ than she thought Arthur capable of. “It’s nothing personal.”

He flicked the clasp on the pen, and waited a moment, watching her with mournful, insincere eyes a deeper purple-blue than Dany’s, and then doubled over in agony.

“You learn to be quick with your hands, working in a pub,” she said, holding his furious gaze as he choked and spewed blood-stained froth, reaching out one pale hand towards her throat. “You weren’t quick enough, you rotten _bastard.”_

He died quickly, his collar stained pale pink, and it was only when his head hit the table that Sansa noticed the scar below his ear.

“ _Bastard,_ ” she restated, and used the pen to slice into the skin under his ear. She was used to this, slicing up cadavers, and missed uni so sharply it shocked her - she thought that she’d more or less gotten used to the idea of not getting back to St. Andrew’s, no matter what she’d moped after leaving HQ with Arthur’s gun, but it seemed that she was wrong. God, she’d wanted to be a doctor since she was a little girl, and now it seemed she was going to have to shelve that _again_ , this time to play spies.

The implant was smaller than she’d expected, but she tugged it out and wrapped it in Arthur’s pocket square, and then she ran as fast as she could, hoping that no one stopped her.

 

* * *

 

 

Merlin looked as if he didn’t know what to think when she strode straight into his office, but Shireen was there, her gun out and a frown on her face.

“I just killed Arthur,” Sansa said, “because he had _this.”_

Merlin caught the implant, wrapped in its red silk, and his face fell.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Looks like it’s just us, ladies - if Arthur is in on this, then I don’t know who we can trust.”

“You mean-”

“Any of the agents could be part of this- this _madness,_ ” Merlin said, “and even if they aren’t, they’re all gossips - those who are innocent will tell those who aren’t.”

Shireen was _watching_ , in a way that hurt Sansa more than the raised gun - Shireen had never looked at her that way, only at Joffrey and his goons, and to think that she now regarded Sansa in the same light was _awful._

“All I did was refuse to shoot my dog, Shireen,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t risk hurting her, just for a job that I’d never fit.”

Shireen’s gun came down, and something small shifted in her expression which eased the knots in Sansa’s stomach.

“We do this alone,” Merlin said, breaking the tension between them. He was watching them over his glasses, his eyes sharp and dark and hard, and the absence of laughter from his gaze made Sansa realise just how deadly serious this all was, more than Arthur trying to kill her or Dany- well, or the fire had.

“Just the three of us. Lancelot, as our only full agent, you’re going to have to do the dangerous part - Sansa, as you are not  _technically_  a part of Kingsman, I can ask only what you want to give.”

“I’m not going to let that sharp-nosed bitch kill half the world, Merlin,” she said flatly. “Where do I start?”

 

* * *

 

Starting point, apparently, was a Learjet, all luxurious and elegant, with customised Kingsman seat covers in rich leathers and suedes, the carpet thick and soft under their feet. Sansa’s runners looked shabby and worn against it, while Shireen’s shiny riding boots and Merlin’s neat Chelsea boots looked just right.

“How come you don’t wear Oxfords?” Sansa asked, once he’d set the autopilot and was fiddling with some great big case down the back of the cabin. “I thought it was uniform, more or less.”

His waistcoat was stretching over his shoulders, dark green satin shining in exquisite contrast with his bright white shirt and pressed charcoal trousers, and he grinned over his shoulder.

“Having a false leg means I’m not fully fit for field work, so I can’t be ranked a proper agent,” he explained, “and not being ranked a proper agent but being in charge of the proper agents, more or less, means I have all the privileges but not quite so many rules. Hence the boots. Why are you looking, anyway?”

“If you two are finished flirting,” Shireen said dryly, “how about Merlin tells us how we’re going to save the world?”

Sansa blushed, and Merlin coughed into the case in front of him.

“This,” Merlin said, “is very old, but very functional, and will allow Lancelot to reach the upper atmosphere, so she can blow up a satellite.”

Sansa looked at Shireen, who looked at her, and then they started to laugh.

“Seriously, though,” Shireen said. “What are we going to do?”

Merlin stood up - something which took more effort on his part than Sansa had ever noticed before, in all their evenings cooped up in his office, in all the time she’d spent watching him out the corner of her eye when she should have been concentrating harder - and turned, slowly, with a smile on his face.

“I’m _always_ serious, Lancelot,” he said. “Hadn’t you noticed?”


	10. In five, four, three...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be the final chapter, but it came to a natural stop here, and I want to post now - I hope to have the final chapter and the epilogue up over the next few days!

“I can’t believe you just turned Shireen into an astronaut,” Sansa said, eyeing all the screens Merlin had revealed behind the smooth teak panelling with considerable suspicion. “She’s afraid of heights.”

“You talked her through that,” he said easily, reaching into another concealed compartment and withdrawing a garment bag. “And besides, I could hardly send  _ you,  _ could I?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sansa said. “After all, I’m not actually a Kingsman agent - surely that makes me more expendable than your new Lancelot?”

A familiar scowl overtook his face, but Merlin let it slide - now wasn’t the time for their usual arguments - and handed her the garment bag. 

“Daenerys had this made, before she… Well. It’s going to be a perfect fit, if you’d care to try it on.”

 

* * *

Cersei smiled when the door of her office opened - only four people had access, besides her, and her favourite had just walked in.

“Hello, poppet,” she cooed, holding out her arms for a hug. Joff sighed, long-suffering, but conceded all the same - no matter how much he complained, he always hugged her back  _ just _ as tight as she hugged him. “All set for the party?”

“The boys just arrived,” he said, pulling away and leaning against the lip of her desk - he was so like Jaime, he really was. “Where’s the Goose, Mother?”

“Your sister has all the details, darling, you know that,” she said, patting his cheek. “She’s kept a few bottles aside for you and your little friends, of course - we did so hope you’d join us here for the party tonight, although we half expected you to stay in London…”

“Yeah, well, after that dirty little Scottish slut and the Baratheon twat bribed their way into staying on despite Targaryen’s  _ promises _ , I wasn’t going to hang around,” he said bitterly, and Cersei fought the urge to offer him comfort - he wouldn’t take it kindly, she knew, but it still hurt her to see him upset. “I hope that bitch didn’t get the position - she’s from money, I know, but not  _ really.  _ They wouldn’t have  _ lost  _ everything if they were meant to have it, after all.”

Cersei chose not to mention the hand she had had in the fall of the Starks, or the great big shove her father had given them, choosing instead to smile and kiss Joff’s cheek again.

“Well, we’ll have all that sorted out by the end of the week, my darling - you and your boys will be running Kingsman soon enough.”

 

* * *

The suit was…

The suit was perfect, of course. Sansa had never owned a single item of clothing that fit her as perfectly as the contents of the garment bag did, from the pretty, rock-solid bra, to the sturdy tan leather brogues that Merlin had passed to her when she poked her head out to ask for shoes. 

But it was also  _ strange. _ She shouldn’t have ever had a chance to wear it - she was not, as Merlin and Shireen had reminded her so many times, both consciously and not, a  _ real  _ Kingsman agent, and this was a  _ real _ Kingsman agent’s suit - and she certainly shouldn’t have been preparing for a secret mission to save the world, and yet here she was.

“Looking good, Sansa,” Merlin said, his eyes wide behind his glasses when she stepped out into the cabin.

“Feeling good, Merlin,” she threw back, not really feeling it but knowing how this sort of thing worked. She’d seen enough spy movies to know that it was bad form to let on that you were scared shitless at the prospect of running towards the men with all the guns, especially considering those same men were under the control of the bastards who’d killed her father and brother. “How far out are we?”

“Another ten minutes,” he said, “and then I have to pilot us in - just enough time for you to make a very special choice, Miss Stark.”

“Is that so, Mr. Merlin?” she teased, stepping back to let him by - another bloody secret compartment, good lord, the whole  _ plane  _ was a secret - so he could show her the stash of weapons hidden behind the panelling. “Are  _ all _ of these for me?”

“If you could carry them, absolutely,” he said, rolling his eyes. “But no, I’m afraid not - you’ve got your glasses and your ring, your shoes, your handgun, and one special treat.”

“What a shame,” she sighed, reaching out and taking an umbrella in exactly the same navy-black shade as her suit. “I wish I had room for a few more.”

Merlin took a moment to let his eyes skim down the full length of her, from the tooled leather toes of her shoes right back up to the tortoiseshell rims of her glasses, and then he grinned.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose we might find a little room for one or two more toys.”

“ _ All this flirting is very charming,” _ Shireen said across the intercom,  _ “but a little advice would not go amiss, Merlin, if you can lift your jaw off the floor a moment.” _

Merlin’s ears and neck flooded with colour, and he grinned shamelessly.

“What’s your altitude, Lancelot?” he asked, settling into the chair before the bank of computers. “It mustn’t be sufficient if you can see clearly enough to pass comment on the state of my jaw.”

_ “Fuck off, Merlin, and tell me when I get to blow the damn thing up.” _

 

* * *

“No one seems to be enjoying themselves very much,” Jaime said, tapping his fingers against the back of her chair as she scanned the last few details. “Well, Joffrey and his odious little friends aside, I suppose.”

Cersei spared him a glance, wondering how it was that he never saw their boy’s true character, and then returned to her work. Tyrion had sent her a huge array of last-minute specs, and she had plenty to keep her occupied before she joined the party.

“I’m sure they’ll get to it soon enough,” she said, waving Jaime’s concern away. “Unless you’d care to give some rousing speech to encourage them to party harder, hmm?”

He laughed, and she rolled her eyes - how typically Jaime, to find amusement right at the cusp of their victory! They were  _ inches  _ away now, with Joff chipped and Tommen and Myrcella and their friends secured in a specially built room - Tyrion had insisted, the little toad, that Myrcella and Tommen  _ not  _ be chipped, and Cersei had relented on this one point, because he  _ had  _ done good work. It was all set to work. It was going to be  _ magnificent. _

Just as soon as the satellites aligned, and the network came online…

A golden-bell chiming signalled just that, and Cersei smiled when Jaime lifted his head from the desk to watch.

The desk, of course, was one big screen, displaying the whole of the satellite network and the whole of the world, a golden net to catch and kill all the unworthy sullying what belonged rightfully to the few. 

A few more numerous than she had supposed.

The boy… That had been a surprise. That Rhaegar would insist on his eldest children, his  _ legitimate  _ children, being secured in the safe room was not surprising, since he was an absent but doting father in Cersei’s experience, but never to the  _ boy. _ The boy stayed away in his boarding school in Switzerland, and nobody ever talked about him, which was just how Cersei liked it.

But Rhaegar had insisted on all  _ three  _ of his children being brought here - the elder two had had to be put into cells, resistant to the very  _ idea  _ of being part of their grand enterprise, but the boy had been sheltered enough that he did as he was told.

“Go check on the boy, love,” Cersei said, nudging Jaime’s hip with her own. “Make sure he’s doing his job properly.”

“You’ve got him checking people in, darling,” Jaime said. “All he has to do is scan their phones and point them to the right hallway.”

“All the same,” she urged. “He’s only a boy - be a dear? For me?”

“For you,” Jaime said, “anything at all.”

That had been less true since he lost his arm than it had before, but Cersei didn’t doubt that he still loved her best, and that he could be trusted more than any other person in the world.

She still waited until the door closed behind him to key in the passcode to arm the satellites. She trusted him with her life, but this was worth more than that - if she did this, it would surpass anything her father had ever done, and she couldn’t risk failure even to spare Jaime’s feelings.

 

* * *

“Personally I think a nice pair of tailored shorts would be better,” Sansa said, turning this way and that and trying not to be obvious about looking for knicker lines on her backside. True, the material of her skirt stretched magnificently, and the split in the back was indecently high - she suspected it was magnetised somehow, because she’d only discovered quite how high it went when stretching her legs - but she would have rathered something with  _ legs. _

If only because the beautiful, feathersoft silk knickers that went with her very pretty, incredibly sturdy bra, were  _ silk knickers.  _ And she had  _ stockings! _ Stockings! Silk bloody stockings!

“Daenerys thought you’d prefer the skirt,” Merlin said, peering ahead of them into the blustery snow. “But then, I don’t think she anticipated you wearing your inaugural suit for your inaugural mission. The first suit is almost ceremonial for the agents.”

“A nice pair of ankle grazers,” Sansa grumbled, smoothing her hands down her thighs and reaching for her glasses. “At least then I’d have decent pockets.”

_ “You’ve got the legs for them,” _ Shireen agreed, via their glasses.  _ “Am I high enough  _ now,  _ Merlin? Preferred answers are “yes,” or “absolutely yes,” thanks.” _

“Still another hundred feet, Lancelot,” Merlin said. “I did promise to let you know when you’d reached optimum altitude, remember.”

Shireen began cursing under her breath, counting seconds in  _ bollocks-fucks _ rather than elephants, and Sansa very nearly laughed - but that would have been rude.

“What about us?” she asked, sliding into the co-pilot’s chair and crossing her legs. “What am I going to do, now that I’m appropriately suited and booted?”

“You’re going to infiltrate the facility,” Merlin said, “disarming any enemy agents you encounter with extreme prejudice, and dismember any Lannisters you meet. Then you’re going to disable the satellite programme that will trigger the nanobots, and figure out where all those kidnapped celebrities and dignitaries are so we can return them home.”

“Nothing much, then.”

“Standard day at Kingsman,” Merlin agreed. “Lancelot? Prime your missiles, please.”

Shireen was cursing some more, which Sansa found funnier now, in a genuine life-or-death situation, than she ever had during training. That likely spoke of something deeply, horribly wrong with her, which she locked down into the same box where she kept the part of her that had wanted to shoot Petyr and not shoot Lady.

_ “I want something added to my will,”  _ Shireen said,  _ “since I’m about to die in space - please put it in writing that Devan Seaworth gets my dog, and that Sansa Stark is a bitch. I want that in writing. I want it to be known that she is a bitch for ever making me think I was not afraid of heights.” _

“You’re not going to die, Lancelot,” Merlin said mildly. “I’ve set the target for you, all you need to do is press the button when you hear beeping, alright?”

_ “Tell my mother I loved her,”  _ Shireen moaned,  _ “and tell my father that he isn’t allowed anywhere near my dog.” _

The beeping echoed across the comm link, and Shireen started cursing again as she did what needed to be done.

The bang echoed, too, and Sansa waited - anything might have happened. It might have backfired, or missed, or not worked at all, and Shireen could be dead or injured or-

_ “I think we’ll need another wallop, Merlin,”  _ Shireen said, her voice almost hysterical.  _ “Think you can get that computer going a little quicker this time? Much obliged, thanks.” _

"Already done, dear," Merlin said, and if Sansa didn't know any better she'd almost think he was having  _fun._ "It's just a matter of pressing a button and we're away!"

 

* * *

 

 

Jaime's phone was buzzing in his pocket, his watch buzzing on his wrist, but he ignored them both in favour of looking at the boy.

He was the image of his uncle. Jaime would know. Ned Stark had given him a black eye as he died, one which had left him hiding out for two weeks until the bruising faded. The boy had that same petulant, glum face, the put-upon, hangdog aura that made the Starks so bloody irritating, because it came with a moral superiority complex the width of the Channel.

It would have been so much easier had the crash killed Stark. Then Jaime wouldn't have had to smother him by hand, and suffer being judged by a dying man.  Jaime was perfectly aware that his morals were a dark charcoal grey at best, and didn't like being reminded of it. He and Cersei had an image to project, after all, and it was hard to maintain the appearance of moral fortitude when people were telling you that you were a disgusting piece of shit.

The boy was only seventeen, tall for his age and skinny like his father. He seemed a polite enough lad, and was certainly obedient, but Jaime could find nothing  _likeable_ about him.  True, Jaime didn't like many people beyond Cersei and Tyrion, and the younger children, but this boy was so  _staid._

"You there," he said. "How many more people are we waiting on?"

"Just one, sir," the boy said, much calmer than Jaime had expected - it was rare that someone wasn't intimidated by his hand, or his name, or even just his face. "My father is late now, but other than him, everyone is here."

Rhaegar Targaryen - of  _course_ he was running late. He was twenty years late catching up with Cersei's feelings, and he'd almost been too late to join their special little party. The boy had as much melancholy and irritating self-pity from his father's side as his mother's, and Jaime supposed it wasn't at all surprising that he was such an annoying little twerp, given his gene pool.

"Very good," Jaime said, for want of anything more. "Remember to go to-"

"The locked room, sir," the boy said, "I know. Mr Lannister was very clear on that."

Tyrion's soft spot for lost and broken things never failed to amuse. Of  _course_ he'd taken to the Targaryen bastard - how typically Tyrion of him.

_Mr. Lannister._ Usually reserved for their father - also very typically Tyrion.   


"Carry on then," Jaime said, feeling a little at a loose end, wondering if he ought to make fun of the boy or if Cersei had had any sort of a plan when she sent him down here. Cersei's plans had been less focused on them as a team and more focused on her individual glory since he'd lost his hand, and she'd left him at a loose end more than he'd like of late.

His watch was still buzzing, and his phone, so he answered. It was Cersei - it was never anyone else - and she was more important than Rhaegar Targaryen's by-blows. She was more important than  _anything._

 

* * *

 

 

Shireen was screaming more from sheer joy at her success than fear at her altitude when Merlin set her little spaceship to come back to Earth, and Sansa was screaming right along with her - it had been like watching Rickon come first in the national cross country championships last year, marking him as a potential future Olympian.  _This is my friend, Shireen, she's just saved the world._

"Oh, bollocks," Merlin grumbled. "They're piggybacking on someone else's satellites - Sansa, you've got to be fast or the world is going to go to shit."]

"The world is already shit, Merlin," she said, "unless you're filthy rich. Is this our stop?"

It had looked like a mountain rising from the cloud ahead of them, until the side of it receded to reveal a gaping cavern, big enough for three Learjets side-by-side. Sansa held her breath as Merlin guided them in, drifting to a gentle stop. 

"As of now," he said, handing her a phone when she stood up to straighten her skirt, "you are Rhaegar Targaryen. It's just gender neutral enough that we might get away with it, since all we need is for them to approve your entry and then you can get to killing Cersei Lannister."

"And remind me why I need to kill her, instead of bringing her in alive?"

"Because her brother won't allow that," Merlin said, typing away on something that looked like pure code - Arya sometimes had to do things like that for college, but Sansa had never been able to make heads or tails of anything beyond the absolute basics - and not looking up. "You've read the files - she's volatile, but he's violent. You have to get through him to get to her."

"So in other words," Sansa said, making sure her glasses were tucked behind her ears, so they wouldn't come off even if she was hanging upside down, "I'll have to kill both Lannister twins."

The idea of Jaime Lannister bleeding to death at her feet had more appeal than she would have liked, but no one ever needed to know that. Not even Merlin.

"You may have to kill a great deal more than just the twins," he warned her, handing two lighters over his shoulder - both, she noticed, engraved with curling triskellions, which made her smile. Merlin had teased Dany for having everything engraved with either dragons or grails, Targaryen on one side and Galahad the Pure on the other, but he was just as bad as she was.

Had been. It would take some getting used to, to consider Daenerys as anything but very, very  _alive._

"I've never killed anyone before," she admitted. "What if-"

"You killed Rhaegar," Merlin said quietly. "The former Arthur - you didn't hesitate, either. You won't hesitate now."

 

* * *

 

 

Jon hated this job, but at least it meant he'd get a minute or two with his father before he had to share with Rhaenys and Aegon. 

Not that he didn't love Rhae and Egg - he did, since Nana died they may as well have been the only family he had left, except for the care packages Viserys bribed past the security at school. But he wanted the sort of relationship Egg had with their father, if only because he didn't have a mother.

Egg and Rhae had their mum and all her family. Jon  _only_ had them, and Father, and Viserys. Daenerys hadn't been in touch in years, not since Nana died, and there was no one else in all the world who cared.

So, he wanted a few minutes alone with his father. He didn't think that was particularly selfish.

The plane carrying his father had a crest he didn't recognise on the side, but that wasn't unusual - Jon never remembered seeing his father in the same car twice, so having never seen the plane before wasn't at all surprising.

What was surprising was the tall, skinny woman with a huge bun of red hair who stepped out of the plane and presented Jon with a phone.

"Rhaegar Targaryen," she said, smiling in what he supposed was a charming sort of way - except that her eyes, behind those weird, old-fashioned glasses, were wide with obvious shock. "I'm expected, I believe."

"Rhaegar Targaryen is expected," Jon said, "but you're not him."

"I assure you-"

"He's my father," Jon cut in. "I would know."

 

* * *

 

 

_So he ruined her._   


"Do you know what your father does?"

The boy - he looked a little older than Rickon, and could have passed for Arya's twin. It was uncanny. It was un _nerving._  

"He runs a multinational," the boy said. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I work for your father," Sansa said, wondering how in God's name she was going to explain  _that_ one. "And I'm looking at you like that because... Well, because of this."

She went off mission, ignoring Merlin cursing up a storm in her ear, and slipped her own phone out of her inner pocket. She'd upgraded half a dozen times - phones broke when you worked behind a bar - but she'd kept her memory card, and she still had pictures of Dad and Robb on there.

One of her and Dad should do the trick. 

"This is my father," she said, handing over her phone, "and if you don't mind me saying, you're the spitting image of him."

The boy looked from Sansa to the phone and back again at least three times, Merlin growling in her ear all the while, and then he met her eyes.

"He looks like my mother," he said. "Can you tell me about her?"


	11. The Final Stretch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been 84 years...
> 
> Tiny epilogue to come after this, should have it up tonight or tomorrow!

“I would love to tell you all I know about her,” Sansa said, hands on the boy’s shoulders - God, he  _ really  _ looked like Arya - “but I’ve got business with Ms Lannister that can’t wait-”

“Are you going to try and stop her?” he asked, biting his lip. “Father had Rhaenys and Aegon locked up because they were trying to stop Cersei, but he knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything - Uncle Viserys is locked up, too.”

Dany had mentioned a Viserys, her other brother, but she’d never mentioned a Rhaenys or an Aegon. How many children had Sansa orphaned, when she poisoned Rhaegar Targaryen? It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Please,” she said, sick with the realisation that this boy was her  _ cousin _ and she didn’t even know his name, “I need you to get to safety, and I need you to do it  _ quickly. _ ”

He frowned, looking just like Dad, and then nodded.

“There’s a safe room,” he said. “Mr Lannister - not Jaime, Tyrion - is there, with some of us. Kids. Some of our parents didn’t want us to get the implants, so Mr. Lannister built a safe room. I’ll be there, when you’re done, and you can tell me about my mother.”

Sansa didn’t have the heart to tell him that she’d only been six when Lyanna died, and only remembered snippets here and there, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was getting this boy to safety, before he became collateral damage.

“I’ll go there,” he said. “And I won’t tell Mr. Lannister you’re here.”

Merlin was in her ear, cursing up a storm because apparently the Lannisters were piggybacking on someone else’s satellite not in a few minutes, but  _ right now _ \- she was on borrowed time as it was, and spending any more time with the boy would only lower the world’s chances of survival, so she stood straight and cleared her throat.

“Right, thank you,” she said, “but I must be off.”

And she ran.

The walls of the corridors were rough-hewn, cut into the heavy granite and left unfinished, but she spotted the motion sensors and the cameras at every junction, and she saw the heavy steel security doors placed at regular intervals, obviously cells.

“Getting all this, Merlin?” she asked, desperately glad that Daenerys had had the sense to order her shoes with next-to-nonexistent heels as she slid around a corner and came face to face with her first red-clad guards. “Any advice?”

“ _ Kick the shit out of them.” _

“Fantastic advice,” she agreed, snapping her umbrella open as the trio ahead of her opened fire, reaching under her left arm for her handgun, “but how do you suggest I get close enough to bring  _ kicking  _ into the equation?”

“ _ Shoot the ones holding the guns,”  _ he said, plainly distracted - she could hear the tap-tap-beep of touchscreen hacking going on over the comms, and couldn’t really blame him. She was distracted, too, and wished the bastards would stop shooting for an extra five seconds a time, so she could get a shot in-

_ Thwup.  _

“Oh, fuck,” she said, staring at the hole just above her head, in her umbrella. “Advice?”

_ “Blow the shit out of them,”  _ Merlin advised, very firmly, and Sansa just had time to tuck away her gun and run her thumb over the triskellion on the lighter she tugged from her bra before she was throwing it, primed, overhead-

The sound it made was very much  _ not  _ a soft thwup, and Sansa gagged against the smell of cooked meat - but she lowered her now-useless umbrella, tossed it aside, and drew her gun again.

She got maybe a hundred yards before she had to raise it.

She didn’t think about the bodies her bullets were hitting - because every bullet found a body, she was a good shot and disdain for murder wasn’t going to change that - because if she did, she’d have to sit down and cry, and she didn’t have time for that. She barely had time to change clips, never mind that, so she didn’t look too hard once she’d gotten off each shot, and she moved forward as fast as she could in her stupid slippy-soled shoes on the polished floors-

“Bollocks,” she gulped, ducking into a recessed doorway when a different crowd of red-suited goons appeared at the far end of the corridor, boxing her in - and she was out of bullets, anyway, even her shotgun cartridge (and the spares she’d hidden in her bra, alongside Merlin’s long-since thrown lighters) used up and now useless. “Merlin-”

_ “I know, Sansa,” _ he said, sounding strained, sounding  _ defeated. “I, too, am bollocksed.” _

Sansa took a deep breath, feeling for the long knife she’d tucked into her stocking top - Dany had given it to her, as a gift, after the train test, and it had felt right to carry it with her tonight. If it came to it, if Merlin couldn’t magic some escape from this hell for them, she’d use the knife rather than let the bastards have the pleasure of killing her.

_ “Sansa,” _ Merlin said, sounding a different kind of strained now, and she felt an answering ache in her throat. “ _ I’ve made sure your family are safe, as best I can, but-” _

_ “This is all terribly touching,”  _ Shireen said, teeth chattering audibly over the comm line,  _ “but I rather think now might be the time to see if you can’t blow up those bloody implants, make everyone’s head pop the way Professor Pycelle’s did, don’t you think?” _

There was a beat - Sansa could hear the goons settling in for an attack at either end of the hall - and then Merlin began to laugh. 

_ “You absolute fucking genius, Lancelot _ ,” he said.  _ “That’s the kind of dirty thinking we prize in our champion traitor! Give me- just a- just give me- there!” _

Sansa could hear the high pitched whine of overloading hardware, and braced herself for impact - what would happen? Would it even work?

“ _ Here we go,”  _ Merlin said, sounding delighted, “ _ here we fucking go!” _

It was inelegant, but effective. It sounded as if Sansa had thrown a thousand lighters at once, a sort of sloppy  _ boom  _ thudding through the mountain, echoing sickly inside Sansa’s head.

_ “Take a peek, Sansa,” _ Merlin said.  _ “I don’t know how effective-” _

She looked. Shireen, obviously having switched on her heads-up, gagged, but Merlin only huffed.

_ “One hundred percent, I suppose,”  _ he said.  _ “Right, Sansa, I don’t imagine-” _

“Hey! Hey, you there!”

Sansa turned around, surprised to hear noise coming from behind the door by which she’d hidden. There was a grate, the kind she’d only seen before on prison doors, which slid across when she pressed.

“You’re that Prince Harry Shireen was talking about!” she exclaimed before she could stop herself - because it  _ was _ Shireen’s Prince Harry, with his blonde hair tousled and his blue eyes furious. “I’ve never met a prince before.”

“Very nice, girl,” he said, and she watched him through newly-narrowed eyes. How rude! “Now let me out!”

“And if I don’t?”

“I am  _ Crown Prince of Sweden,” _ he said, blue-eyed fury turning almost manic. “You  _ will  _ release-”

“ _ So, one more wolf has come to be slaughtered,”  _ Cersei Lannister’s voice cut in, echoing across the tannoy system like a migraine.  _ “I’ve watched six of your kind die, Sansa Stark, let’s make it lucky seven.” _

Robb, Dad, Lya, Brandon, Ben, Granddad. Six Starks dead in suspicious circumstances since Sansa was born. Had there been a Lannister involved in all of those deaths? It seemed impossible, and Cersei was probably only saying it to try and piss her off, but even so - it was  _ working.  _

“Pardon me,” Sansa said to Prince Harry, adjusting her suit and tucking a straying pin back into her hair. “I have a world to save.”

He shouted something after her, but she had more important things to concern herself with than some puffed up twit who, according to Shireen, seemed to think women had been put on this earth for his pleasure. 

“ _ Don’t go into this headfirst, Sansa,”  _ Merlin cautioned.  _ “I know you’re angry, but you’ve just fought your way through two miles of corridor, and Jaime Lannister will be fresh.” _

“And old,” she pointed out, skidding round a corner, to the last stretch before the big room. “And-”

_ “The most dangerous man in the British Army, not so long ago,”  _ Merlin said.  _ “He was a captain in the SAS, Sansa. Major-General Sir Jaime Lannister, KBE.” _

“Fuck,” she said. “Well, alright. Thank God I took all those fencing lessons, I suppose.”

The room was as rough-hewn as the hallways, with cubbies cut into the heavy walls - and hundreds of headless corpses still steaming in the discoball-sparkling gloom. It was sickening, but she didn’t have time for that. She  _ couldn’t  _ have time for that. 

Cersei Lannister was in a room high above the main chamber, with mascara tracks down her cheeks. Had these people been her friends? Was she mourning them?

“So you’re the little bitch who slept her way into Kingsman,” she said, “ahead of my  _ Joff.” _

Joffrey.  _ Joffrey.  _ Jesus, this was his  _ mother,  _ Jesus! It made sense, given everything she’d ever known of him, but even so - Jesus! Fuck!

_ Is Joffrey one of these headless corpses? _ Sansa was distantly aware of Merlin and Shireen having similar reactions to her own over the mics, but she was more concerned by the Lannisters standing in front of her, one above and the other below.

Cersei, Sansa realised, was standing behind a table, but Jaime was unobstructed, taller than Sansa remembered and unscrewing his false hand like a bottletop. 

To reveal a fucking  _ fencing foil.  _

“I didn’t sleep with anyone at Kingsman,” Sansa said primly, casting about for something, anything, to use to counter  _ Sir  _ Jaime. “Not that it’d be any of your business if I had, thanks. Besides, I didn’t need to cheat to be better than Joff.”

“I wouldn’t antagonise her, little girl,” Jaime said, rolling his shoulders with a smile. “She’s the really dangerous one, and she’s just lost the most precious thing in the world.”

Screens on all the walls were showing ugly things, livestreams of violence and destruction from across the world, and Sansa felt sick. She was letting that happen while she  _ bantered,  _ like some sort of shitty movie spy. 

“Eyes here, little girl,” Jaime said, and sprung.

The sword in his arm was gold, and the edge glinted like a razor against the shifting light. 

“Right then,” Sansa said, casting about for something she could use to counter him.  _ Why  _ hadn’t she thought to save a bullet or two?

“ _ If you can get in close,”  _ Merlin said in her ear,  _ “use your shoeblade. Otherwise, Dany had your hair sticks weighted - use them like throwing knives.” _

“I guessed that much,” she said, swaying back when Lannister lunged forward. “Don’t really have time for that, thanks!”

“Is that Kingsman’s pet cripple?” Lannister taunted. “Hello, Tyrell! Long time no see, old boy - still nursing your pride over that  _ accident?” _

Willas cursed up a storm over the comms, but Lannister’s gloating gave Sansa a chance to drop into a slide, giving her maybe thirty seconds of space and time to find  _ anything  _ to stop that fucking  _ arm  _ of his.

 

* * *

Granddad was the one who insisted that Sansa go to fencing lessons.

“If Arya has to do ballet, Sansa has to do fencing,” he’d said, and since Sansa had refused point blank to go to Arya’s fencing master just as Arya had refused to go to Sansa’s ballet teacher, Granddad had talked to an old friend of his and cajoled her into giving Sansa private lessons.

Because initially, Sansa had been  _ awful.  _ Maege had all but given up on her, for lacking the precision and ferocity needed to really make something of herself with a foil in hand, when Sansa had thrown a tantrum and won three matches in a row against Maege’s second-youngest, Jorelle. 

She’d studied under Maege Mormont for ten years, and had joined the fencing club at St. Andrew’s as soon as possible, so she was good. She  _ knew  _ she was good.

But Jaime Lannister was  _ great.  _

And Sansa was hanging on by the skin of her teeth, and she knew it. She rolled behind one of the artfully distressed sofas draped with a pair of headless society belles, found a platform Louboutin stiletto, and jumped up, throwing it frisbee-style at Lannister’s head - it didn’t connect, but it  _ did _ buy her a few seconds, just enough to finally drag one of the hair sticks from the bun on top of her head, take aim, throw overarm, and-

“ _ Oh my God,”  _ came Shireen’s voice, and Sansa almost laughed. The stick had glanced off the side of Lannister’s neck, no damage done, but there was a vicious-looking red-black rot spreading from that graze now, covering his throat and his jaw and his  _ face- _

_ “I’m going to need those back immediately, Sansa,” _ Merlin said, sounding a little perturbed.  _ “And if Dany hadn’t died a fiery death, I’d be kicking her arse the length of the labs for stealing my bloody neurotoxins for personal projects.” _

“How  _ dare  _ you?”

Sansa looked up, standing as straight as she could considering she had a pulled hamstring and probably a torn ligament in her ankle from a dodgy landing. She had a thumping fucking headache, too, and a particularly sharp slap from Lannister had left her with an aching jaw, a bloody mouth, and what she suspected might be a loose tooth. She was  _ tired.  _ She was  _ pissed off.  _

And Cersei Lannister still had her hand on that  _ fucking  _ table.

“Your brother oversaw my brother’s death,” Sansa said, bending down and picking Lannister’s false hand up from the wreckage of his rotting body. “Fair’s fair, I think.”

She tested the weight. Not a million miles away from a javelin, really, and while Arya and Robb had always been the ones to excel at athletics, Sansa had held her own. It was expected of a Stark at St. George’s, after all.

“Your brother was an idiot,” Cersei said, “but mine was helping me reshape the world-”

“In your own image?” Sansa guessed, adjusting her grip, judging the distance. She could make it. It only looked so far because it was up, not across.

“You insolent little  _ bitch-” _

She made the throw. The blade of her twin’s hand caught Cersei Lannister just under the breastbone, tilted up because of the angle. She coughed twice, first clean and second bloody, and staggered forward toward Sansa, gun suddenly in her hand.

The shot went wide, but it shattered the glass. Sansa felt as if she were watching it all unfold from miles away, from the safety of the jet with Merlin, or on a mountainside with Shireen.

Cersei Lannister fell, hitting the ground on her side, shining amidst the sparkling shards of glass like something lovely and lethal.

"So is this the part where you make some witty pun to round out your victory, is it?" Cersei wheezed, somehow managing to look mocking even with her own blood staining her teeth red.

Sansa smiled. She took a moment to straighten her skirt and button her jacket, and then evaluated Cersei. Two, three minutes of life left, absolute max, less if the blade had torn her lungs rather than just piercing one of them. Torn diaphragm for sure, which was almost as bad. Silk dress torn from falling back through the shattered window. Perfect golden hair scattered and spilled, unpinned and bloodied, too.

"Don't worry," Sansa assured her. "I’ve never really liked spy movies."

She picked up a pair of champagne flutes and a magnum on her way out, tossing her hair back over her shoulder and nudging her glasses straight with the heel of her hand.

"Well  _ done _ , sweetheart." Merlin's voice was warm in her ear, flooded with pride and admiration and that soft, smokey growl she'd heard once or twice during her training. It had been wonderful then, but now, it was like the flip of a switch that turned on her sex drive.

The champagne was suddenly a lot more than a celebration. Oh  _ God. _

“Hey!” she heard as she passed Prince Harrold’s cell. “Hey, did you save the world?”

Sansa considered it for a moment, and then smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I did.”

Prince Harrold’s smile was… Sleazy. There was no other word for it. “So, you want to come in?”

Sansa didn’t have to consider that one. “No, I do not.”

And she carried on, out to the jet.

Merlin spun in his chair to greet her when she stepped onto the jet, and there was something about the way the stripes on the cuffs of his pilot's jacket accented the lines of his wrists and his long-fingered hands that made heat pulse between her legs.

His smile faltered just a little as she set the booze and the glasses down on the table behind him, and it became something else altogether when she reached back and took the sticks from her hair. 

"My name is Willas," he told her, offering her a hand to guide her as she straddled his lap and shook out her hair. "Not Merlin."

Her skirt rode up to reveal the tops of her stockings, and his free hand came down to cover the snap of her garter. He flicked it loose, looking at her over the tops of his glasses, and she smoothed his lapels while trying to steady her breathing. 

"You did very well today," he said, pulse ticking visibly in his neck as she started on his tie. He'd tied it in a perfect double Oxford, and she took her time untying it, letting the fine silk run through her fingers while he brushed his thumb over the inner curve of her thigh. "I couldn't have planned a better operation given two weeks and a full complement of agents."

He pushed her skirt higher up her legs as she set to work on his shirt, popping his buttons while he tugged the neat bows of satin on her hips free, gently pulling away the obscenely expensive scrap of silk from between her legs and dropping it beside the champagne bottle with something like a challenge in the set of his jaw. 

He grinned, and she spread her hand flat over his chest, measuring the rapid hammering of his heart against his ribs. His thumb kept rubbing in those neat circles on the inside of her thigh, and she traced her free fingertips around the shell of his ear and down, along that sensitive nerve and over his Adam's apple, following the beautiful blush that was spreading down his throat and his chest. 

"Tell me," she said idly, pushing his shirt and that sinful uniform jacket wide open, wondering when he'd started on her blouse and jacket. "What's the Kingsman policy on employee fraternisation?"

"Tell me," he said in response, that  _ delicious _ growl back in his voice as he hooked one long finger behind the gore of her bra, using it to tug her closer. "Do I honestly look like a man who gives a single fuck about the organisation right at this minute?"

She dipped her head just enough to kiss him, long and slow and just enough to make the hand on her thigh go tight and slide north, just a little. While he was distracted with that, she unbuttoned her cuffs and slipped off jacket and blouse, tossing them to the nearest chair so they'd be off the floor. Her glasses followed next, on the table beside her knickers and his tie, and then his glasses.

"My goodness," he said breathlessly, looking her up and down. "I'm going to put you forward for our new Arthur, just so we can be certain there isn't a fraternisation policy."

She laughed at that, and kept laughing while he unclasped her bra single-handed and eased that same hand up under the secure, firmly-padded lace-outer cup to cradle her breast in those exquisite fingers of his.

His skin was bright and salty with sweat under her tongue when she leaned in and kissed his neck, finding the spots that would be as delicate under the barrel of a gun as under her mouth. He moaned, low and hot, as he tipped his head back, leaving him exposed, leaving him  _ vulnerable. _

"When we have the luxury of a bed," he said, nothing left of his voice but that growl, "I'm going to go down on you for so long you won't be able to walk straight for a month." 

The hand on her thigh shifted, twisted, and set to stroking over her in careful, smooth movements, as if she were something delicate and impossibly lovely.

"We'll have to take you off active duty," he said, turning his head as hers fell back, his lips warm against her ear. "We might even have to take you off desk duty, if I do my job properly - if you can't walk straight, how can you  _ sit  _ straight?"

She whimpered. She wasn't proud of it, but God in  _ heaven  _ he was good, lips and tongue-tip whispering against her skin while he guided her into easing her bra down her arms and off, and then the very edge of his teeth sharp on her nipple, the soothing brush of his tongue and the greedy heat of his mouth and  _ oh,  _ oh goodness-

He sank two fingers into her with a groan, muffled against her breastbone, and pressed his thumb firm to her clit in  _ just _ the right way to make her shake. It was a good shaking, though, one that made her twist her fingers through his thick, curly hair and slide her other hand down his back, under his shirt, to feel the taut, hot skin over the firm muscles of his shoulders. 

“Arthur hadn’t a clue what he was talking about when he said you weren’t cut out for this world,” Willas breathed against her jaw, tilting his head up to press a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Stupid, old money bastard couldn’t see the talent right in front of him, and blamed everyone else for what happened the last time he brought in a Scot - but you showed him.”

“You saw that?” she asked, forcing her eyes open - they felt so heavy, weighed down with pleasure and wanting - to look at him sidelong. “And what did you think?”

“That I’d never been more aroused in my life,” he said, tugging her in and down with a hand splayed over the dip of her spine, hot even against her flushed skin. “Until you walked in with a bottle of Dom Perignon in hand, of course.”

His chest was broad and firm, the muscles in his shoulders and arms flexed tense and hard as he held her in his lap and stripped off his jacket and shirt, and the steel of his dog tags was bright against the dark hair on his chest, the chain warm from his skin and smooth to the touch. 

She wound the long chain through her fingers, using it to draw him closer, so she could kiss him again, this time dirty, all tongues and a hint of teeth, until he gave another of those low groans.

“Remember,” she said against his mouth, slipping a hand between them to trace over the straining buttons of his trousers, “it’s only gentlemanly to make sure the lady finishes first.”

“Tut, tut, Sansa,” he reprimanded, all teasing and half madness. “The  _ truly  _ gentlemanly thing would be to ensure that the lady finishes at _ least _ once prior to the act itself.”

His fingers curled inside her, stroking so exquisitely that she buried her face in the curve of his neck and mewled helplessly, rocking her hips against his hand as he began his labours in earnest.

“If we had the time and the space,” he growled against her ear, “if I had my mouth on your gorgeous cunt, you’d have come for me twice already. At  _ least.” _

Well, an assurance like that was bound to wreak havoc on a lady, wasn’t it? She just about managed not to scream as her orgasm bloomed low in her belly and  _ spread,  _ that perfect heat sinking into her bones and flowering as far as her fingertips, one hand curled behind his neck and the other clinging to his trousers for dear life, just in case she shook hard enough to lose her seat. It was unlikely - thanks to her training, she was an excellent rider - but she was grateful for the strength of his arm around her waist all the same.

“Oh, my,” she said, lifting her head and blushing all over again at the wicked edge of his smile. “You  _ terrible  _ man.”

“Pardon me, madam,” he said, indignant and fond, “but I am a  _ gentleman. _ ”

And then he kissed her again, another filthy one, and threaded a hand into her hair while she worked his trousers open and down, and then shoved his very respectable briefs down after them. Probably she ought to have asked permission, but he still had two fingers crooked inside her, still had his thumb applying perfect pressure to her clit in firm little circles, and buried his face between her breasts when she wrapped her hand around his cock and stroked, twisting her wrist just slightly, so she was sure he didn’t mind that she’d presumed.

“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he said, the tip of his nose sweeping over her collarbone and leaving goosebumps in its wake. “Terribly inappropriate, I know, but you’re so beautiful that I couldn’t help myself. I knew you had to be something special, for Daenerys to bring you in, and I was so damn curious that I excused my interest as professional.”

“And it wasn’t?” she murmured, nuzzling against the soft, short hair behind his ear, delighting in the shudder the brush of her lips against his ear sent rolling down his spine. “Professional, that is?”

He was hot in her hand, and his fingers were urgent, now, eager as they touched her, and she bit her lip while she waited on his answer.

“It was, initially,” he murmured, “but increasingly less so, as time went on. I could quote Mr. Darcy to make the moment more romantic, if you’d like-”

“Perhaps later,” she said, tightening her grip enough to make him curse against the hinge of her jaw. “I’ve got other things in mind just now.”

“If you check the inner pocket of my jacket,” he said, “you will find proof that a gentleman is always prepared.”

He wrapped his arm back around her waist, kissing feather-soft along her shoulder and arm as she leaned over him to reach his jacket, and she shivered when he sucked a soft bruise into the inside of her elbow. In the inner pocket of his jacket was a condom, and she laughed to find it.

“Presumptuous,” she teased, settling back in his lap.

“Prepared,” he corrected her. “As a gentleman ought to be, I remind you.”

He kissed her while she opened the condom and rolled it down his cock, taking what might have been greater care than necessary in doing so, and sighed into her moan as she sank down the full length of him in one easy roll of her hips.

“My God,” he whispered, and then he lifted a hand to her hair and tipped his head to kiss her hard. “You are glorious.”

Sansa wanted slow, and she could feel the same desire in the tension of Willas’ fingers on her hip, in the tight-pull of the muscles in his stomach when she ran her hand down his chest, but whatever she might have wanted in theory, her body had a different plan - Willas’ hips rose to meet hers on every too-quick thrust, and his teeth dragged sharp-sweet over her lower lip when she tightened around him.

“Gorgeous,” he bit out, and she let her head fall back with a smile. His mouth was hot on her neck then, and those wonderful fingers of his slipped back between her legs to tease at her clit, to coax her just that little bit further just that little bit faster. “God, you’re so perfectly lovely, I can’t even imagine how much better this would be if we had more  _ time-” _

Sansa didn’t need much more time, she could feel her orgasm building just beyond her reach, but the way Willas trailed more of those searing kisses down her breasts, working his tongue over first one nipple and then the other with the same measured care as he was giving her clit, well, that was pushing her in exactly the right direction.

“A true gentleman,” she sighed, letting her head roll forward so she could tuck her face against his neck while she came, shaking into a moan that rumbled up from somewhere deep in her chest. That proved his breaking point, and he was all arched spine and trembling hands as he gasped her name like his life depended on it and bucked his hips frantically under hers. Once she’d found her voice, after orgasm and endorphin-fuelled laughter and a moment of pure, breathless wonder at sex that was just  _ sex,  _ good and fun and  _ pleasurable,  _ she lifted her head and grinned down at him from her high seat.

“A true gentleman,” she repeated, which made him look askance. “Made sure the lady orgasmed first - you’re a credit to Kingsman.”

_ “Now that you’re all happily reunited and alive,”  _ Shireen said after another quiet few minutes, her voice crackling over the comms,  _ “could I trouble the pair of you to put your clothes back on and collect me? It’s bloody freezing up here, you know.” _


	12. Epilogue: Viscount Biscuits

The dining room in the back of the shop was buzzing by the time Sansa arrived, and she assumed that meant that Arthur had  _ finally  _ arrived.

“High time,” she murmured, slipping into her chair between Shireen and Willas. There weren’t really set seats anymore, aside from Arthur’s at the head of the table, and that was just as well - there were more than a few bastards who were still turning their noses up at Sansa, and she was glad to be able to sit between Shireen and Willas, especially since Melisandre, alias Percival, always sat on Shireen’s far side, and  _ everyone  _ was terrified of her.

“Now now,” Willas chided, smiling. He took the coffee she placed in his hand without looking up, and leaned over to kiss her cheek while she was passing out drinks to Shireen and Mel. “Play nice with the new boss, love, they haven’t even gotten started yet.”

“Yes, well,” Sansa said, starting in on her own triple shot (of caramel syrup) with gusto. “ _ Some  _ of us like to be  _ on time.” _

Arthur’s chair turned, and Daenerys levelled Sansa with a glare that could’ve striped paint.

“I won’t warn you about insubordination again, Galahad,” she said, wagging one pink-scarred finger in Sansa’s direction, and holding out the other hand for her coffee. “Just because I am your mentor-”

“- you  _ were -” _

“- doesn’t mean I won’t fine the  _ shit _ out of you for talking back to me.”

Silence had fallen over the rest of the table, with only a few smiles - Oberyn, of course, their ever-smiling Kay, and Ellaria, newly installed as Bedivere - and a great many scowls. Sansa was well used to that by now, though, and tossed a packet of Viscount biscuits out into the middle of the table.

“Peace offering, for ruining the  _ tone of things _ again, Dagonet,” she said, smiling when Dag, a big old softie under all the nonsense he blustered about  _ rules  _ and  _ tone  _ and  _ propriety.  _ He waved her off, cigar trailing smoke and ash in its wake, and turned to Dany.

“Right then,” he said. “Now that you’re here, I would like to make a suggestion.”

“No, Dag, we’re not petitioning the government to repeal the smoking ban again-”

“I’d like to suggest that the new agents get their bloody houses,  _ actually,” _ he said, scathingly cool in the face of Dany’s gentle amusement. “Melly and I have been talking about it-”

“And we’re in agreement that the fact that the table has denied the newest members of our little family their  _ bloody  _ houses is, in fact, a travesty.”

Dany was frowning now.  _ Genuinely  _ frowning. That was never good.

“Listen here, you old farts,” she said, scratching at the burn scars that licked pink and vivid up her neck and cheek. “I know you don’t like anything about the way I’m taking the organisation, but I’m in charge, and I’ll become as much a tyrant as my dear departed brother if that’s what it takes to drag you mean old bastards into this century.”

“Well said,” Willas said, not looking up from his tablet. Sansa’s phone beeped in her pocket, and so did Shireen’s, and Willas was smiling, when she looked again. “Sorry for the delay, ladies, but I couldn’t act without Arthur’s override - well, I could, but hacking around the block wouldn’t have been polite.”

And Shireen’s family had a house in Belgravia, anyway, and Sansa had been hunting out a decent house in Edinburgh for her family between the short missions she and Shireen had been going on - clean up things, around Europe mostly, since apparently the Yanks didn’t much like it that Daenerys had stepped on their toes, and they weren’t cleared for non-EU missions, according to Willas.

When she wasn’t up in Edinburgh, she’d either slept at the manor, or at Willas’ place. She didn’t really  _ need  _ a house, unless…

“That nice four bed in Morningside,” he said, out the side of his mouth. He’d come with her last weekend, to look at houses for Mum and the others, and had taken a particular liking to one that had previously been owned by a wheelchair user and was already adapted to suit most of Bran’s needs. “It was ideal, wasn’t it?”

“Very much so, thank you very much,” she said, shaking her head. “What’d you get Shireen?”

_ “Camden, _ ” Shireen said dreamily. “I don’t even mind that my browsing history is obviously being spied on, this is  _ perfect. _ ”

Ellaria, down the table, was having a rapid conversation with Oberyn - unsurprising, since they had four children between them and had been together for years and years.

Dag looked delighted, and a little smug. Dany looked delighted to have caused such obvious consternation.

Just a normal Tuesday morning then, really.

“If we’re quite finished infighting for the day,” Dany said, throwing her apparently empty coffee cup into the bin in the corner, not seeming to care when the dregs splashed onto the antique wall panelling, “can someone please tell me what in God’s name made you decide to put Tyrion Lannister into  _ genpop?” _

The last Lannister sibling should’ve had guardianship of his sister’s children, but since he was a fully-confessed accomplice to the plan to cause a massive genocide of the global poor, well, that’d been stripped, and the youngest Lannisters had been passed into the care of their grandfather’s sister. 

As for the others who’d been in Tyrion Lannister’s safe room, well…

“He’ll be moved by lunchtime,” Willas said, tapping away at his tablet with a smile. “And I’ve arranged for the security upgrades for Cersei’s children and your brother’s, before you ask.”

Rhaegar’s children were quite something, now that Sansa had met them. Rhaenys, the eldest, was Robb’s age, beautiful and fierce and terrifyingly protective of her mother and little brothers, and Aegon, the older boy, was Sansa’s own age, just as beautiful as Rhaenys but rather drippier.

And then there was Jon, who could’ve been Arya’s twin, had he not been so baby-faced. Rhaenys had driven him all the way up to Edinburgh, planted him in front of Mum, and said “Well, that’s the hard part done. Shall I make tea?”

And it had worked. He was spending two weekends in every six in Scotland now, and he and Arya were reportedly getting along so well that Mum was becoming concerned for their safety.

“And the American situation?” Dany asked. “They’ve been sending me a dozen messages a day demanding an apology - has anyone told them that arthur@kingsman.co.uk sends to the same agent who infringed on their territory now, rather than to my brother?”

“I didn’t think they needed to know that just yet,” Willas said, finally looking up. “I’ve invited Washington and Hamilton over for a little tete-a-tete, just to… Figure the lay of the land.”

Shireen passed Sansa a fiver under the table, because they’d been trying to get the truth of it out of Willas for  _ weeks _ now. Sansa had insisted that he had invited the Yanks to tea, and Shireen had refused to bet more than a fiver, because she felt Sansa was at an unfair advantage, seeing as she was sleeping with Willas.

Which was fair enough, really. It wouldn’t have been difficult to cheat and seduce an answer out of him.

“Is Washington still that horrible wart with the bad beard?” Dany asked, accepting something from Alain with a small smile. “I can tolerate him, so long as Hamilton isn’t that boor with the hat anymore.”

“That Hamilton is now Jefferson, as far as I can tell,” Melisandre said. “The new Hamilton is - oh, remember that  _ fabulous  _ chap who used to be Adams? Him! How lovely!”

Dany’s small smile went wide and dragony, and Sansa went very still.

“Wonderful,” she said, looking to Shireen. “That means someone’s going to shoot at us, doesn’t it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it, after a shamefully irregular update schedule!
> 
> Many thanks to Brad, Carolyn, Hester, Jo, Kate, and Laura, who've held my hand through many a disaster in the writing of this (and every other fic ever), and many thanks to all of you, who've read and subscribed and commented and left kudos!
> 
> (I will get to replying to every comment, I promise, I've just fallen a little behind on that front recently.)
> 
> Again, thank you so much, and I hope this story did its job and entertained everyone!


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